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HOUGHTON,  MIFFLIN  &  COMPANY 
Boston  and  New  York 


BOOKS,  CULTURE  AND 
CHARACTER 


BOOKS,  CULTURE 
AND  CHARACTER 


BY 


J.  N.  LARNED 

Author  of  **  A  Primer  of  Right  and  Wrong,' 


BOSTON    AND    NEW    YORK 
HOUGHTON,    MIFFLIN    &    COMPANY 

1906 


COPYRIGHT    1906   BY  J.  N.   LARNKD 
ALL    RIGHTS    RESERVED 

Fublished  October  iqab 


10O3 


CONTENTS 

I.  A  FAMILIAR  TALK  ABOUT  BOOKS       .       .  I 

II.  THE  TEST  OF  QUALITY  IN  BOOKS      .       .  39 

III.  HINTS  AS  TO  READING 49 

IV.  THE  MISSION  AND  THE   MISSIONARIES 

OF  THE  BOOK 73 

V.  GOOD  AND   EVIL   FROM    THE  PRINTING 

PRESS 115 

VI.  PUBLIC   LIBRARIES   AND    PUBLIC   EDU- 

CATION         135 

VII.      SCHOOL-READING       VERSUS        SCHOOL- 
TEACHING    OF    HISTORY       ....    159 


I 

A   FAMILIAR   TALK   ABOUT 
BOOKS 


A  FAMILIAR  TALK  ABOUT 
BOOKS ^ 

I  WAS  asked  to  say  something  to  you 
about  books  ;  but  when  I  began  to  col- 
lect my  thoughts  it  seemed  to  me  that 
the  subject  on  which  I  really  wished  to 
«peak  is  not  well  defined  by  the  word 
Books. 

If  you  had  been  invited  to  listen  to  a 
discourse  on  baskets,  you  would  natu- 
rally ask,  "  Baskets  of  what?  "  The  bas- 
ket, in  itself,  would  seem  to  be  a  topic  so 
insignificant  that  you  might  reasonably 
object  to  the  wasting  of  time  on  it.  It  is 
a  thing  which  has  no  worth  of  its  own, 
but  borrows  all  its  useful  value  from  the 
things  which  are  put  into  it.    It  belongs 

*  Addressed  originally  to  the  students  of  the 
Central  High  School,  Buffalo,  N.  Y. 


4  A   FAMILIAR   TALK 

to  a  large  class  of  what  may  be  called  the 
conjunctive  utensils  of  mankind  —  the 
vessels  and  vehicles  which  are  good  for 
nothing  but  to  hold  together  and  to  carry 
whatever  it  may  be  that  men  need  to  con- 
vey from  one  to  another  or  from  place  to 
place. 

Now,  books  are  utensils  of  that  class 
quite  as  distinctly  as  baskets  are.  In 
themselves,  as  mere  fabrications  of  paper 
and  ink,  they  are  as  worthless  as  empty 
wickerware.  They  differ  from  one  an- 
other in  value  and  in  interest  precisely  as 
a  basket  of  fruit  differs  from  a  basket  of 
coals,  or  a  basket  of  garbage  from  a  bas- 
ket of  flowers,  —  which  is  the  difference 
of  their  contents,  and  that  only. 

So  it  is  not,  in  reality,  of  books  that 
I  wish  to  speak,  but  of  the  contents  of 
books.  It  may  be  well  for  us  to  think  of 
books  in  that  way,  as  vessels  —  vehicles 
—  carriers  —  because  it  leads  us,  I  am 
sure,  to  more  clearly  classified  ideas  of 
them.   It  puts  them  all  into  one  category, 


ABOUT  BOOKS  5 

to  begin  with,  as  carriers  in  the  com- 
merce of  mind  with  mind;  which  instantly 
suggests  that  there  are  divisions  of 
kind  in  that  commerce,  very  much  as 
there  are  divisions  of  kind  in  the  mer- 
cantile traffic  of  the  world  ;  and  we  pro- 
ceed naturally  to  some  proper  assort- 
ing of  the  mind-matter  which  books  are 
carriers  for.  The  division  we  are  likely 
to  recognize  first  is  one  that  separates  all 
which  we  commonly  describe  to  ourselves 
as  Knowledge,  from  everything  which 
mind  can  exchange  with  mind  that  is 
not  knowledge,  in  the  usual  sense,  but 
rather  some  state  of  feeling.  Then  we  see 
very  quickly  that,  while  knowledge  is  of 
many  kinds,  it  is  divisible  as  a  whole  into 
two  great,  widely  different  species,  the 
line  between  which  is  an  interesting  one 
to  notice.  One  of  those  species  we  may 
call  the  knowledge  of  what  has  been,  and 
the  other  we  will  describe  as  the  know- 
ledge of  what  is.  The  first  is  knowledge 
of  the  past ;  the  second  is  knowledge  of 


6  A  FAMILIAR   TALK 

the  present.  The  first  is  History ;  the 
second  is  (using  the  word  in  a  large 
sense )  Science.  We  are  not  straining  the 
term  Science  if  we  make  it  cover  every- 
thing, in  philosophy,  politics,  economics, 
arts,  that  is  not  historical ;  and  we  shall 
not  be  straining  the  term  Poetry  if  we  use 
that  to  represent  everything  which  we 
have  left  out  of  the  category  of  positive 
knowledge,  being  everything  that  be- 
longs to  imagination  and  emotion. 

In  History,  Science,  Poetry,  then,  we 
name  the  most  obvious  assorting  of  the 
matter  known  as  Literature,  of  which 
books  are  the  necessary  carriers.  But 
there  is  another  classification  of  it,  not 
often  considered,  which  is  a  more  impor- 
tant one,  in  my  view,  and  which  exhibits 
the  function  of  books  much  more  impres- 
sively. Draw  one  broad  line  through 
everything  that  mind  can  receive  from 
mind,  —  ever}^thing,  —  memor>%  thought, 
imagination,  suggestion,  —  and  put  on 
one  side  of  it  all  that  has  come  from  the 


ABOUT   BOOKS  7 

past,  against  everything,  on  the  other 
side,  that  comes  from  the  present,  and 
then  meditate  a  little  on  what  it  signifies ! 
In  our  first  classification  we  considered 
the  past  only  with  reference  to  history, 
or  knowledge  of  the  past.  Now,  I  wish 
to  put  with  that  all  of  our  knowledge,  of 
every  kind,  that  has  come  to  us  out  of'&vQ. 
past ;  and  when  you  have  reflected  a 
moment  you  will  see  that  that  means  al- 
most everything  that  we  know.  For  all 
the  knowledge  now  in  the  possession  of 
mankind  has  been  a  slow  accumulation, 
going  on  through  not  less  than  seventy 
centuries.  Each  succeeding  generation 
has  learned  just  a  little  that  was  new,  to 
add  to  what  it  received  from  the  genera- 
tions before,  and  has  passed  the  inherit- 
ance on  with  a  trivial  increase.  We  are 
apt  to  look  rather  scornfully  at  any  sci- 
ence which  is  dated  before  1900.  But 
where  would  our  brand-new  discoveries 
have  been  without  the  older  ones  which 
led  up  to  them  by  painful  steps  ?   In  nine 


8  A   FAMILIAR  TALK 

cases  out  of  ten  it  was  an  eye  of  genius 
that  caught  the  early  glimpses  of  things 
which  dull  eyes  can  see  plainly  enough 
now. 

Most  of  the  science,  then,  which  we 
value  so  in  these  days,  has  come  to  us,  in 
the  train  of  all  history,  out  of  the  past ; 
and  poetry,  too,  has  come  with  it,  and 
music,  and  the  great  laws  of  righteous- 
ness, without  which  we  could  be  little  bet- 
ter than  the  beasts.  How  vast  an  estate 
it  is  that  we  come  into  as  the  intellectual 
heirs  of  all  the  watchers  and  searchers  and 
thinkers  and  singers  of  the  generations 
that  are  dead  !  What  a  heritage  of  stored 
wealth  !  What  perishing  poverty  of  mind 
we  should  be  left  in  without  it  1 

Now,  books  are  the  carriers  of  all  this 
accumulating  heritage  from  generation 
to  generation ;  and  that,  I  am  sure  you 
will  agree  with  me,  is  their  most  impres- 
sive function.  It  will  bear  thinking  of  a 
litde  further. 

You  and  I,  who  live  at  this  moment, 


ABOUT  BOOKS  9 

stand  islanded,  so  to  speak,  on  a  narrow 
strand  between  two  great  time-oceans,  — 
the  ocean  of  Time  Past  and  the  ocean  of 
Time  to  Come.  When  we  turn  to  one, 
looking  future-ward,  we  see  nothing  — 
not  even  a  ripple  on  the  face  of  the  silent, 
mysterious  deep,  which  is  veiled  by  an 
impenetrable  mist.  We  turn  backward 
to  the  other  sea,  looking  out  across  the 
measureless  expanse  of  Time  Past,  and, 
lo  I  it  is  covered  with  ships.  We  see 
them  rise  from  beyond  the  far  horizon  in 
fleets  which  swarm  upon  the  scene,  and 
they  come  sailing  to  us  in  numbers  that 
are  greater  than  we  can  count.  They  are 
freighted  with  the  gifts  of  the  dead,  to  us 
who  are  the  children  of  the  dead.  They 
bring  us  the  story  of  the  forgotten  life 
of  mankind,  its  experience,  its  learning, 
its  wisdom,  its  warnings,  its  counsels,  its 
consolations,  its  songs,  its  discoveries  of 
beauty  and  joy.  What  if  there  had  been 
no  ships  to  bring  us  these  ?  Think  of  it ! 
What  if  the  great  ocean  of  Time  Past 


lo  A   FAMILIAR  TALK 

rolled  as  blankly  and  blackly  behind  us 
as  the  ocean  of  Time  to  Come  rolls  before 
us  ?  What  if  there  were  no  letters  and 
no  books  ?  For  the  ships  in  this  picture 
are  those  carriers  of  the  commodities  of 
mind  which  we  call  Letters  and  Books. 

Think  what  your  state  would  be  in  a 
situation  like  that !  Think  what  it  would 
be  to  know  nothing,  for  example,  of  the 
way  in  which  American  Independence 
was  won,  and  the  federal  republic  of  the 
United  States  constructed ;  nothing  of 
Bunker  Hill ;  nothing  of  George  Wash- 
ington, —  except  the  little,  half  true  and 
half  mistaken,  that  your  fathers  could 
remember,  of  what  their  fathers  had  re- 
peated, of  what  their  fathers  had  told  to 
them  !  Think  what  it  would  be  to  have 
nothing  but  shadowy  traditions  of  the 
voyage  of  Columbus,  of  the  coming  of 
the  Mayflower  pilgrims,  and  of  all  the 
planting  of  life  in  the  New  World  from 
Old  World  stocks,  —  like  Greek  legends 
of  the  Argonauts  and  of  the  Heraclidae  ! 


ABOUT   BOOKS  ii 

Think  what  it  would  be  to  know  no  more 
of  the  origins  of  the  English  people,  their 
rise  and  their  growth  in  greatness,  than 
the  Romans  knew  of  their  Latin  begin- 
nings ;  and  to  know  no  more  of  Rome 
herself  than  we  might  guess  from  the 
ruins  she  has  left !  Think  what  it  would 
be  to  have  the  whole  story  of  Athens  and 
Greece  dropped  out  of  our  knowledge, 
and  to  be  unaware  that  Marathon  was 
ever  fought,  or  that  one  like  Socrates  had 
ever  lived  !  Think  what  it  would  be  to 
have  no  line  from  Homer,  no  thought 
from  Plato,  no  message  from  Isaiah,  no 
Sermon  on  the  Mount,  nor  any  parable 
from  the  lips  of  Jesus  ! 

Can  you  imagine  a  world  intellectually 
famine-smitten  like  that  —  a  bookless 
world  —  and  not  shrink  with  horror  from 
the  thought  of  being  condemned  to  it  ? 

Yet,  —  and  here  is  the  grim  fact  which 
I  am  most  anxious  to  impress  on  your 
thought,  —  the  men  and  the  women  who 
take  nothing  from  letters  and  books  are 


12  A   FAMILIAR  TALK 

choosing  to  live  as  though  mankind  did 
actually  wallow  in  the  awful  darkness  of 
that  state  from  which  writing  and  books 
have  rescued  us.  For  them,  it  is  as  if  no 
ship  had  ever  come  from  the  far  shores 
of  old  Time  where  their  ancestry  dwelt ; 
and  the  interest  of  existence  to  them  is 
huddled  in  the  petty  space  of  their  own 
few  years,  between  walls  of  mist  which 
thicken  as  impenetrably  behind  them  as 
before.  How  can  life  be  worth  living  on 
such  terms  as  that?  How  can  men  or 
women  be  content  with  so  little,  when 
they  might  have  so  much  ? 

I  have  dwelt  long  enough  on  the  gen- 
eralized view  of  books,  their  function  and 
their  value.  It  is  time  that  I  turned  to 
more  definite  considerations. 

You  will  expect  me,  no  doubt,  to  say 
something  of  the  relative  value  of  books, 
to  indicate  some  principles  in  choosing 
them,  and  to  mark,  perhaps,  some  lines 
for   reading.    There   must  always  be  a 


ABOUT  BOOKS  13 

difficulty  in  that  undertaking  for  any  per- 
son who  would  give  advice  to  others  con- 
cerning books,  though  his  knowledge  of 
them  surpassed  mine  a  hundredfold.  For 
the  same  book  has  never  the  same  value 
for  all  minds,  and  scarcely  two  readers 
can  follow  the  same  course  in  their  read- 
ing with  the  same  good.  There  is  a  per- 
sonal bent  of  mind  which  ought  to  have 
its  way  in  this  matter,  so  far  as  a  deliber- 
ate judgment  in  the  mind  itself  will  allow. 
So  far,  that  is,  as  one  can  willingly  do  it 
who  desires  the  fullest  culture  that  his 
mind  is  capable  of  receiving,  he  should 
humor  its  inclinations.  Against  an  eager 
delight  in  poetry,  for  example,  he  should 
not  force  himself,  I  am  sure,  to  an  obsti- 
nate reading  of  science  ;  nor  vice  versa. 
But  the  lover  of  poetry  who  neglects 
science  entirely,  and  the  devotee  of 
science  who  scorns  acquaintance  with 
poetry,  are  equally  guilty  of  a  foolish 
mutilation  of  themselves.  The  man  of 
science  needs,  even  for  a  large  appre- 


14  A   FAMILIAR   TALK 

hension  of  scientific  truth,  and  still  more 
for  a  large  and  healthy  development  of 
his  own  being,  that  best  exercise  of  im- 
agination which  true  poetry  alone  can 
give.  The  man  of  poetic  nature,  on  the 
other  hand,  needs  the  discipline  of  judg- 
ment and  reason  for  which  exact  learn- 
ing of  some  kind  is  indispensable. 

So  inclination  is  a  guide  to  follow,  in 
reading  as  in  other  pursuits,  with  extrem- 
est  caution  ;  and  there  is  one  favorite  di- 
rection in  which  we  can  never  trust  it 
safely.  That  is  down  the  smooth  way  of 
indolent  amusement,  w^here  the  gardens 
of  weedy  romance  are,  and  the  fields  in 
which  idle  gossip  is  gathered  by  farmers 
of  news.  Of  the  value  of  romance  in 
true  literature,  and  of  the  intellectual 
worth  of  that  knowledge  of  passing 
events  which  is  news  in  the  real  sense,  1 
may  possibly  say  something  before  I  am 
done.  I  touch  them  now  only  to  remark, 
that  the  inclination  which  draws  many 
people  so  easily  into  a  dissipated  reading 


ABOUT  BOOKS  15 

of  trashy  novels  and  puerile  news-gossip 
is  something  very  different  from  the  incli- 
nation of  mind  which  carries  some  to  sci- 
ence, some  to  history,  some  to  poetry. 
In  the  latter  there  is  a  turn  of  intellect, 
a  push  of  special  faculties,  a  leaning  of 
taste,  which  demand  respect;  as  I  have 
said.  The  former  is  nothing  more  than 
one  kind  of  the  infirmity  which  produces 
laziness  in  all  its  modes.  The  state  of  a 
novel-steeped  mind  is  just  that  of  a  loun- 
ging, lolling,  slouching  body,  awake  and 
alive  enough  for  some  superficial  pleas- 
ant tickling  of  sense-consciousness,  but 
with  all  energy  drained  out  of  it  and  all 
the  joy  of  strength  in  action  unknown. 
It  is  a  loaferish  mind  that  can  loll  by  the 
hour  over  trash  and  trivialities  in  a  novel 
or  a  newspaper. 

To  come  back  to  the  question  of 
choice  among  good  books:  there  is  a 
certain  high  region  in  all  departments 
of  literature  which  every  reader  who 
cares  to  make  the  most  of  himself  and 


i6  A   FAMILIAR   TALK 

the  best  of  life  ought  to  penetrate  and 
become  in  some  measure  acquainted 
with,  whatever  his  personal  leanings  may- 
be. It  is  the  region  of  the  great  books  — 
the  greatest,  that  is,  of  the  greater  kinds. 
For  the  realm  of  literature  is  a  vast  uni- 
verse of  solar  systems  —  of  suns  and  sat- 
ellites ;  and,  while  no  man  can  hope 
to  explore  it  all,  he  may  seek  and  find 
the  central  sources  of  light  in  it  and  take 
an  illumination  from  them  which  no  re- 
flected rays  can  give.  In  poetry  (which 
I  must  speak  of  again),  I  doubt  if  many 
people  can  read  very  much  of  minor 
verse  —  the  verse  of  merely  ingenious 
fancies  and  melodious  lines  —  with  intel- 
lectual benefit,  whatever  pleasure  it  may 
afford  them.  But  \\\^  great  poems,  which 
fuse  thought  and  imagination  into  one 
glorified  utterance,  will  carry  an  enrich- 
ment beyond  measuring  into  any  mind 
that  has  capacity  to  receive  them.  I  be- 
lieve that  those  fortunate  young  people 
who  are  wise  enough,  or  wisely  enough 


ABOUT  BOOKS  17 

directed,  to  engrave  half  of  Shakespeare 
upon  their  memories,  lastingly,  in  their 
youth,  with  something  of  Milton,  some- 
thing of  Goethe,  something  of  Words- 
worth, something  of  Keats,  something  of 
Tennyson,  something  of  Browning,  some- 
thing of  Dante,  something  of  Homer  and 
the  Greek  dramatists,  with  much  of  He- 
brew poetry  from  the  Bible,  have  made 
a  noble  beginning  of  the  fullest  and 
finest  culture  that  is  possible.  To  mem- 
orize great  poems  in  early  life  is  to  lay 
a  store  in  the  mind  for  which  its  happy 
possessor  can  never  be  too  thankful  in 
after  years.  I  speak  from  experience, 
not  of  the  possession  of  such  a  store, 
but  of  the  want  of  it.  I  have  felt  the  want 
greatly  since  I  came  to  years  when  mem- 
ory will  not  take  deposits  graciously, 
nor  keep  them  with  faithfulness,  and  I 
warn  you  that  if  these  riches  are  to  be 
yours  at  all  you  must  gather  them  in 
your  youth. 

A  great  poem  is  like  a  mountain  top, 


i8  A   FAMILIAR  TALK 

which  invites  one  toward  the  heavens, 
into  a  new  atmosphere,  and  a  new  vision 
of  the  world,  and  a  new  sense  of  being. 
There  are  no  other  equal  heights  in  liter- 
ature except  those  which  have  been  at- 
tained by  a  few  teachers  of  the  divinest 
truth,  who  have  borne  messages  of  right- 
eousness to  mankind.  Even  as  literature, 
to  be  read  for  nothing  more  than  their 
quality  and  their  influence  as  such,  what 
can  compare  with  the  parables  and  dis- 
courses of  Jesus,  as  reported  in  the 
Gospels  ?  I  know  of  nothing  else  that 
comes  nearer  to  them  than  a  few  of  the 
dialogues  of  Plato,  which  exhibit  the  char- 
acter and  represent  the  higher  teachings 
of  Socrates.  The  three  dialogues  called 
the  "Apology,"  the  "Crito,"  and  the 
"Pha^do,"  which  tell  the  sublime  story  of 
the  trial  and  death  of  Socrates,  are  writ- 
ings that  I  would  put  next  to  the  books 
of  the  Evangelists  in  the  library  of  every 
young  reader.  They  were  published 
separately  a  few  years  ago,  in  a  small. 


ABOUT   BOOKS  19 

attractive  volume,  under  the  title  of  "  The 
Trial  and  Death  of  Socrates,"  and  they 
are  also  to  be  found  in  the  second  vol- 
ume of  the  fine  translation  of  Plato  made 
by  Professor  Jowett.  Another  selection  of 
half  a  dozen  of  the  best  of  the  Socratic 
dialogues  can  be  had  in  a  charming  little 
book  entitled  "Talks  with  Athenian 
Youths."  By  the  side  of  these,  I  would 
put  the  "Thoughts"  of  the  Emperor 
Marcus  Aurelius  and  the  "  Enchiridion  " 
of  Epictetus;  and  not  far  from  them  I 
would  place  the  "  Essays  "  of  Lord  Bacon 
and  of  our  own  wise  Emerson. 

These  are  books,  not  of  mere  Know- 
ledge, but  of  Wisdom,  which  is  far  above 
Knowledge.  Knowledge  is  brought  into 
the  mind ;  Wisdom  is  from  its  own 
springs.  Knowledge  is  the  fruit  of  learn- 
ing ;  Wisdom  is  the  fruit  of  meditation. 
Knowledge  is  related  to  the  facts  of  life, 
and  to  man  in  his  dependence  on  them ; 
Wisdom  is  concerned  with  life  itself,  and 
with  man  in  his  own  being.    Knowledge 


20  A   FAMILIAR  TALK 

equips  us  for  our  duties  and  tasks  ;  Wis- 
dom lights  them  up  for  us.  The  great 
meditative  books,  such  as  these  I  have 
named,  are  books  that  have  lifted,  exalted, 
illuminated  millions  of  minds,  and  their 
power  will  never  be  spent  A  book  of 
science  grows  stale  with  age,  and  is 
superseded  by  another.  The  book  of 
wisdom  can  never  grow  old.  But  in  this 
age  of  science  it  is  apt  to  be  neglected, 
and  therefore  I  speak  with  some  plead- 
ing for  it.  Do  not  pass  it  by  in  your  read- 
ing. 

In  what  I  say  to  you,  I  am  thinking  of 
books  as  we  use  them  in  reading,  not  in 
study.  Study  has  some  special  cultivation 
of  mind  or  particular  acquisition  in  view  ; 
reading  is  a  more  general,  discursive,  and 
lighter  pursuit  of  the  good  that  is  in 
books.  Now,  it  is  looking  at  them  in  that 
way,  broadly,  that  I  will  make  a  few  sug- 
gestions about  books  which  belong  in 
what  I  have  classed  as  the  literature  of 
knowledge.    I  would  award  the  highest 


ABOUT  BOOKS  21 

place  in  that  class  to  history,  because  it 
gives  more  exercise  than  any  other,  not 
alone  to  every  faculty  of  our  intelligence, 
—  to  our  reason,  our  judgment,  our 
memory,  and  our  imagination,  —  but  to 
every  moral  sensibility  we  possess.  But 
if  history  is  to  be  read  with  that  effect,  it 
must  not  be  read  as  a  mere  collection  of 
stories  of  war  and  battle,  revolution  and 
adventure.  It  must  not  be  traversed  as 
one  strolls  through  a  picture  gallery, 
looking  at  one  thing  in  a  frame  here,  and 
another  thing  in  a  frame  there,  —  an  epi- 
sode depicted  by  this  historian,  an  epoch 
by  that  one,  the  career  of  a  nation  by  a 
third,  —  each  distinct  from  every  other, 
in  its  own  framing,  and  considered  in 
itself.  To  read  history  in  that  way  is  to 
lose  all  its  meaning  and  teaching.  On 
the  contrary,  we  must  keep  always  in  our 
minds  a  view  of  history  as  one  great 
whole,  and  the  chief  interest  we  find  in  it 
should  be  that  of  discovering  the  connec- 
tion and  relation  of  each  part  to  other 


22  A  FAMILIAR  TALK 

parts.  Of  course  we  have  to  pick  up  our 
knowledge  of  it  in  pieces  and  sections ; 
but  only  so  fast  as  we  can  put  them  to- 
gether, and  acquire  a  wide,  comprehen- 
sive survey  of  events  and  movements,  in 
many  countries,  will  historical  knowledge 
become  real  knowledge  to  us,  and  its 
interest  and  value  be  disclosed  to  our 
minds.  We  see  then  what  a  seamless  web 
it  is,  woven,  as  Goethe  describes  it,  in 
"  the  roaring  loom  of  time,"  of  unbroken 
threads  which  stretch  from  the  begin- 
ning of  the  life  of  men  on  the  earth,  and 
which  will  spin  onward  to  the  end.  We 
read  then  the  history  of  our  own  country 
as  a  part  of  the  history  of  the  English 
people,  and  the  history  of  the  English 
people  as  a  part  of  the  history  of  the  Ger- 
manic race,  and  Germanic  history  in  its 
close  sequence  to  Roman  history,  and  Ro- 
man history  as  the  outcome  of  conditions 
which  trace  bac*k  to  Greece  and  the  an- 
cient East.  We  read  the  thrilling  nar- 
rative of  our  great  civil  war,  not  as  a 


ABOUT  BOOKS  23 

tragical  story  which  begins  at  Sumter  and 
ends  at  Appomattox,  but  as  the  tremen- 
dous catastrophe  of  a  long,  inflexible 
series  of  effects  and  causes  which  runs 
back  from  the  New  World  into  the  Old, 
and  through  centuries  of  time,  slowly 
engendering  the  conflict  which  exploded 
at  last  in  the  rebellion  of  a  slave-holding 
self-interest  against  the  hard-won  supre- 
macy of  a  national  conscience. 

Concerning  history,  then,  I  come  back 
again,  with  special  emphasis,  to  the  coun- 
sel I  gave  generally  before :  read  the 
great  books,  which  spread  it  out  for  you 
in  large  views.  Whatever  you  may  seek 
in  the  way  of  minute  details  and  close 
studies,  here  and  there,  for  this  and  that 
period  and  country,  get  a  general  ground- 
work for  them  in  your  mind  from  the 
comprehensive  surveys  of  the  great  his- 
torians. Above  all,  read  Gibbon.  If  you 
would  comprehend  modern  history,  you 
must  read  his  "  Decline  and  Fall  of  the 
Roman  Empire."    It  is  the  one   funda- 


24  A   FAMILIAR  TALK 

mental  work.  Though  it  is  old,  nothing 
supersedes  it.  It  is  an  unequaled,  unap- 
proached  panorama  of  more  than  a  thou- 
sand years  of  time,  crowded  with  the 
most  pregnant  events,  on  the  central 
stage  of  human  history.  Whatever  else 
you  read  or  do  not  read,  you  cannot 
afford  to  neglect  Gibbon. 

Of  the  ages  before  Gibbon's  period, 
in  Roman,  Greek,  and  Oriental  history, 
there  is  nothing  which  offers  a  really  large, 
comprehensive  survey.  But  Maspero, 
Sayce,  McCurdy,  Thirlwall,  Grote,  Cur- 
tius,  Mahalfy,  Mommsen,  Merivale,  are 
of  the  best.  For  a  brief,  clear  account  of 
the  Roman  Republic,  sketching  its  inner 
rather  than  its  surface  history,  I  know  of 
nothing  else  so  good  as  Horton's  "  His- 
tory of  the  Roman  People." 

Generally,  as  regards  ancient  history, 
there  is  a  warning  which  I  find  to  be 
needed.  Within  quite  recent  years,  the 
discoveries  that  have  been  made,  by 
digging  into  buried  ruins  of  old  cities. 


ABOUT  BOOKS  25 

bringing  to  light  and  comparing  great 
numbers  of  records  from  the  remotest 
times,  preserved  by  their  inscription  on 
earthen  tablets  and  on  stone,  have  so 
added  to  and  so  corrected  our  knowledge 
of  ancient  history  that  the  narratives  of 
the  older  historians  have  become  of  little 
worth.  It  is  an  utter  waste  of  time,  for 
example,  to  read  the  venerable  Rollin, 
new  editions  of  whose  history  are  still 
being  published  and  sold.  You  might 
as  well  go  to  Ptolemy  for  astronomy,  or 
to  Aristotle  for  physical  science.  It  is  a 
worse  waste  of  time  to  read  Abbott  his- 
tories, and  their  kind.  Beware  of  them. 
Mediaeval  history,  too,  and  many  pe- 
riods more  modern,  have  received  new 
light  which  discredits  more  or  less  the 
historians  who  were  trusted  a  generation 
or  two  ago,  Hallam  is  found  to  be  wrong 
in  important  parts  of  his  view  of  the  in- 
stitutions of  feudalism.  Hume  is  seen  to 
give  untrue  representations  of  English 
political  history  at  some  of  its  chief  turn- 


26  A  FAMILIAR  TALK 

ing  points.  Macaulay  has  done  frequent 
injustice  in  his  powerful  arraignment  of 
great  actors  on  the  British  stage.  The 
study  and  the  writing  of  history  have  be- 
come more  painstaking,  more  accurate, 
more  dispassionate,  less  partisan  and  less 
eloquent,  but  more  just.  We  get  the 
surest  and  broadest  views  of  it  in  Free- 
man, Stubbs,  Maitland,  Green,  Gairdner, 
Gardiner,  Ranke,  May,  Lecky,  and  See- 
ley  for  English  history,  with  Bagehot  to 
describe  the  present  working  of  the  Eng- 
lish Constitution. 

In  continental  histor)%  mediaeval  and 
modern,  I  will  mention  just  a  few  among 
many  of  the  books  which  I  think  can  be 
recommended  safely  :  Church's  "  Begin- 
nings of  the  Middle  Ages,"  Emerton's 
**  Mediaeval  Europe,"  Bryce's  "  Holy 
Roman  Empire,"  some  of  Freeman's 
"  Historical  Essays,"  Milman's  "  Histor}' 
of  Latin  Christianity,"  Symonds's  "  Re- 
naissance in  Italy,"  Trollope's  "  Com- 
monwealth of   Florence,"   Ranke's   and 


ABOUT  BOOKS  27 

Creighton's  histories  of  the  Papacy  in 
the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries, 
Hausser's  "  Period  of  the  Reformation," 
Baird's  Huguenot  histories,  Motley's 
"  Rise  of  the  Dutch  Repubhc "  and 
"  United  Netherlands,"  Gindely  or  Gar- 
diner's "  Thirty  Years  War,"  Perkins's 
"  France  under  Mazarin,"  "  France  under 
the  Regency,"  and  "  France  under  Louis 
XV.,"  Rocquain's  "  Revolutionary  Spirit 
Preceding  the  Revolution,"  Prof.  Henry 
Morse  Stephen's  "  French  Revolution," 
Fournier's  "  Napoleon,"  Thayer's  **  Dawn 
of  Italian  Independence,"  Andrews's 
"  Historical  Development  of  Modern  Eu- 
rope," and  the  series  by  different  writers, 
entitled  "  Periods  of  European  History," 
edited  by  Arthur  Hassell.  Moreover,  the 
little  books  in  the  series  called  "  Epochs 
of  English  History "  and  "  Epochs  of 
Modern  History"  are  almost  all  of  them 
excellent. 

Into   American  history  it  is  best,  for 
several  reasons,  that  we,  of  this  country, 


28  A  FAMILIAR  TALK 

should  go  more  thoroughly  than  into  that 
of  other  countries.  One  who  tries  to  get 
his  knowledge  of  it  from  a  single  book 
or  two  will  remain  very  ignorant.  The 
best  of  the  general  narratives  which  at- 
tempt to  cover  the  whole,  from  Columbus, 
or  even  from  Captain  John  Smith,  to 
President  McKinley,  are  only  sketches 
that  need  to  be  filled.  For  many  parts  of 
that  filling,  the  series  of  volumes  now  in 
course  of  publication  under  the  general 
editorship  of  Professor  Hart,  of  Harvard 
University,  in  which  successive  periods 
and  movements  are  treated  by  diflferent 
writers,  can  be  recommended  safely. 
"The  American  Nation:  A  History,"  is 
the  title  of  the  series.  But  take  from  John 
Fiske,  I  would  say,  his  colonial  histo- 
ries, —  especially  "  Old  Virginia  and  her 
Neighbours  "  and  **  The  Dutch  and  Qua- 
ker Colonies,"  —  and  his  story  of  **  The 
American  Revolution,"  together  with 
that  of  "The  Critical  Period  "  which  fol- 
lowed it,  down  to  the  adoption  of  the  Fed- 


ABOUT  BOOKS  29 

eral  Constitution.  For  your  own  delight 
you  should  linger  long  enough  in  colo- 
nial times  to  read  all  that  Parkman  has 
written  of  the  French  in  America  and  of 
their  great  effort  to  possess  the  continent. 
Irving,  in  his  "  Life  of  Washington,"  and 
McMaster,  in  his  "  History  of  the  People 
of  the  United  States,"  will  give  you  a  good 
knowledge  of  the  first  years  of  the  repub- 
lic ;  but  you  will  never  understand  Jeffer- 
son and  Madison,  and  the  rise  of  the  great 
old  political  parties,  and  the  War  of  18 12 
with  England,  if  you  do  not  read  the  his- 
tory written  by  Henry  Adams,  which  cov- 
ers the  time  between  John  Adams  and 
Monroe.  For  the  next  third  of  a  century, 
I  would  trust  to  Hoist's  **  Constitutional 
and  Political  History,"  and  Professor 
Burgess's  history  of  "  The  Middle  Pe- 
riod," as  it  is  named  in  the  "  American 
History  Series."  These  works  are  made 
needlessly  hard  reading  by  their  style, 
but  they  are  full  of  good  instruction. 
With  them  I  would  place  half  a  dozen 


30  A   FAMILIAR  TALK 

of  the  biographies  in  the  series  of  the 
"American  Statesmen,"  for  side  Hghts 
thrown  upon  the  politics  of  the  time. 
Then  take  Rhodes's  "  History  of  the 
United  States  from  the  Compromise  of 
1850,"  which  carries  you  through  and  be- 
yond the  civil  war.  For  that  great  strug- 
gle I  consider  Nicolay  and  Hay's  "  Abra- 
ham Lincoln  "  to  be,  on  the  whole,  the  best 
history  that  has  been  written  yet.  It  is  a 
huge  work,  in  many  volumes,  but  no  one 
who  reads  it  will  waste  time  or  easily  tire. 
Along  with  it  should  be  read  the  collected 
writings  of  Abraham  Lincoln,  which  are 
the  most  lasting  literature,  excepting, 
perhaps,  Emerson's  "  Essays,"  that  Amer- 
ica has  produced.  As  a  whole  series  of 
state  papers,  I  believe  that  the  speeches, 
letters,  messages,  and  proclamations  of 
President  Lincoln  are  the  most  extraor- 
dinar}',  in  wisdom,  in  spirit,  and  in  com- 
position, that  ever  came,  in  any  country 
or  any  age,  from  the  tongue  and  pen 
of  one  man.    You  will  find  it  an  educa- 


ABOUT   BOOKS  31 

tion,  both  in  literature  and  in  politics,  to 
read  them  again  and  again.  Read,  too, 
the  simply  and  nobly  written  "  Personal 
Memoirs,"  of  General  Grant,  with  those 
of  Sherman,  Sheridan,  and  Joe  Johnston, 
Long's  '*  Life  of  Lee,"  Blaine's  "  Twenty 
Years  in  Congress,"  and  your  knowledge 
of  rebellion  history  will  be  quite  complete. 
Then  cap  your  reading  in  this  region  of 
history  and  politics  with  Bryce's  "  Amer- 
ican Commonwealth,"  and  I  would  have 
no  great  desire  to  urge  more. 

Biography  is  in  one  sense  a  part  of 
history  ;  but  that  which  interests  us  in 
it  most,  and  from  which  we  take  the 
most  good,  if  we  take  any,  is  more  than 
historical.  The  story  of  a  life  which  offers 
nothing  but  its  incidents,  informs  us  of 
nothing  but  its  achievements,  was  never 
worth  the  telling.  Fill  it  with  romance, 
or  glorify  it  with  great  triumphs,  and  still 
there  is  small  worth  in  it.  If  he  who  lived 
the  life  is  not  in  himself  more  interesting 
and  more  significant  to  us  than  all  the 


32  A  FAMILIAR  TALK 

circumstance  of  his  life,  then  the  circum- 
stance is  vainly  set  forth.  What  biogra- 
phy at  its  best  can  give  us,  as  the  finest 
form  of  history,  and  as  more  than  his- 
tory, is  the  personal  revelation,  the  in-seen 
portraiture  of  here  and  there  a  human 
soul  which  is  not  common  in  its  quality. 
The  exemplars  that  it  sets  most  abun- 
dantly before  us,  of  a  vulgar  kind  of  prac- 
tical success  in  the  world,  —  the  success 
of  a  mere  self-seeking  talent  and  industry 
applied  to  private  business  or  to  public 
affairs,  —  are  well  enough  in  their  way, 
and  may  make  some  small  impressions 
of  good  effect  on  some  minds ;  but  we 
take  no  inspiration  from  them  —  they 
give  us  no  ideals.  What  we  ought  to  seek 
everywhere  in  books  is  escape  from  the 
commonplace  —  the  commonplace  in 
thought  and  the  commonplace  in  char- 
acter with  which  our  daily  life  surrounds 
us.  Our  chief  dependence  is  on  books 
to  bring  us  into  intercourse  with  the 
picked,  choice  examples  of  human  kind ; 


ABOUT  BOOKS  33 

to  show  us  what  they  are  or  what  they 
have  been^  as  well  as  what  they  have 
thought,  —  what  they  have  done,  as  well 
as  what  they  have  said,  —  with  what  mo- 
tives, from  what  impulses,  with  what 
powers,  to  what  ends,  in  what  spirit,  the 
work  of  their  lives  has  been  done.  When 
biography  does  that  for  us  it  is  one  of 
the  most  precious  forms  of  literature.  But 
when  it  only  crams  our  library  shelves 
with  "  process-print "  pictures,  so  to 
speak,  of  commonplace  characters  in 
commonplace  settings  of  life,  we  waste 
time  in  reading  it.  I  know  people  who 
relish  biography  as  they  would  relish 
gossip  in  talk,  delighting  in  disclosures 
from  other  men's  and  other  women's 
lives,  no  matter  how  trivial,  and  all  the 
more,  perhaps,  when  some  spicing  of 
scandal  is  in  them.  So  far  as  it  invites 
reading  in  that  spirit  there  is  nothing  to 
commend  it.  But  I  have  never  known 
one  person  who  enjoyed  what  may  be 
called  the  fine   flavors   of  character  in 


34  A   FAMILIAR  TALK 

biography  who  had  not  fine  tastes  in  all 
literature. 

The  composition  of  biography  would 
seem  to  be  one  of  the  most  dif^cult  of 
literary  arts,  since  masterpieces  in  it  are 
so  few.  The  delightful  and  noble  sub- 
jects that  have  been  offered  it  in  every 
age  of  the  world  are  abounding  in  num- 
ber, but  how  many  have  been  worthily 
treated  ?  One  can  almost  count  on  his 
fingers  the  biographical  works  that  hold  a 
classic  place  in  common  esteem.  Gener- 
ally, of  the  best  and  greatest  and  most 
beautiful  lives  that  have  been  lived  there 
is  no  story  which  communicates  the  gran- 
deur or  the  charm  as  we  ought  to  be 
made  to  feel  it. 

The  most  famous  of  biographies,  that 
of  Doctor  Samuel  Johnson  by  his  ad- 
miring friend  Boswcll,  has  a  strong  and 
striking  personality  for  its  subject ;  but 
who  can  read  it  without  wishing  that 
some  figure  more  impressive  in  human 
history  stood  where  a  strange  fortune  has 


ABOUT   BOOKS  35 

put  the  sturdy  old  Tory,  in  the  wonder- 
ful light  that  reveals  him  so  immortally  ? 
Among  literary  men,  Sir  Walter  Scott 
has  come  nearer,  perhaps,  than  any  other 
to  Doctor  Johnson's  good  fortune,  in  the 
life  of  him  written  by  Lockhart,  his  son- 
in-law.  Trevelyan's  **  Life  and  Letters  of 
Macaulay,"  and  the  "  Memoirs  of  Charles 
Kingsley"  by  his  wife,  are  probably  the 
best  of  later  examples  in  literary  biogra- 
phy. But  in  a  certain  view  all  the  more 
eminent  "  Men  of  Letters,"  English  and 
American,  may  be  called  biographically 
fortunate  since  the  publication  in  Eng- 
land and  America  of  the  two  series  of 
small  biographies  so  named.  It  is  true 
that  these  are  rather  to  be  looked  upon 
as  critical  studies  and  sketches  than  as 
biographies  in  the  adequate  sense ;  but 
most  of  them  are  remarkably  good  in 
their  way,  and  for  these  busy  days  of 
many  books  they  may  suffice.  The  same 
is  true  of  the  "  Twelve  English  States- 
men" series  in  political  biography,  as 


36  A  FAMILIAR  TALK 

well  as  of  the  series  of  "  American  States- 
men," alluded  to  before. 

Using  the  term  "  study  "  in  the  sense 
in  which  artists  use  it,  when,  for  example, 
they  distinguish  between  a  portrait  and 
a  "  study  of  a  head,"  I  should  apply  it 
to  a  large  class  of  biographical  sketches 
which  are  as  true  to  literary  art  as  the 
most  finished  biography  could  be,  and 
only  lack  its  completeness  in  detail.  The 
prototype  of  all  such  writings  is  found  in 
"  Plutarch's  Lives,"  which  are  studies  — 
comparative  studies  —  of  the  great  char- 
acters of  antiquity,  and  models  to  this  day 
of  their  kind.  As  we  have  them  in  Dry- 
den's  translation  revised  by  Clough,  or 
in  the  old  translation  by  North  which 
Shakespeare  used,  there  is  no  better  read- 
ing for  old  or  for  young. 

Scientific  biography  is  at  its  best,  I 
should  say,  in  the  "  Life  and  Letters 
of  Charles  Darwin,"  by  his  son.  In  the 
"  Life  and  Letters  "  of  Huxley,  the  letters 
are  delightful,  and  the  story  of  the  life 


ABOUT  BOOKS  37 

is  most  interesting,  despite  a  lack  of  skill 
in  the  telling.  The  "  Life  of  Thomas 
Edward,"  the  humble  Scotch  naturalist, 
by  Doctor  Samuel  Smiles,  is  hardly  to 
be  surpassed  as  a  book  of  edification 
and  delight,  especially  for  the  young. 
Smiles's  "  Life  of  Robert  Dick  "  is  nearly 
but  not  quite  as  good  ;  and  the  "  Auto- 
biography of  James  Nasmyth,"  man  of 
science  and  great  engineer,  edited  by  the 
same  skillful  hand,  is  one  of  the  books 
which  I  never  lose  an  opportunity  to  press 
upon  boys,  for  the  sake  of  the  wonderful 
example  it  sets  before  them,  of  a  thought- 
ful plan  of  life  perseveringly  carried  out, 
from  beginning  to  end.  Other  works  of 
Smiles  in  industrial  biography  —  lives 
of  Watts,  the  Stephensons,  and  many 
more  —  are  all  exceptionally  interesting 
and  wholesome  to  read. 

Franklin's  autobiography,  in  the  same 
line  of  interest  and  influence,  is  one  of  the 
books  which  the  world  would  be  greatly 
poorer  without.    Grimm's   "  Life  of  Mi- 


38  A   FAMILIAR  TALK 

chael  Angelo  "  takes  a  kindred  lesson  of 
life  and  lifts  it  to  a  setting  more  heroic, 
Goethe's  autobiography  and  his  "  Con- 
versations with  Eckermann  "  are  of  the 
books  that  stamp  themselves  inefface- 
ably  on  a  receptive  mind,  and  that  ought 
to  be  read  before  the  enthusiasms  of 
youth  are  outworn. 

But  I  am  particularizing  books  much 
more  than  it  was  my  intention  to  do.  I 
had  planned  a  hasty  excursion  along  the 
watersheds  of  literature,  so  to  speak,  just 
to  notice  some  features  of  the  geography 
of  the  world  of  books,  and  point  here  and 
there  to  a  monument  that  seemed  impor- 
tant in  my  view.  To  assume  to  be  really 
a  guide  for  any  other  reading  than  my 
own  is  more  than  I  am  willing  to  under- 
take. 


II 


THE   TEST  OF   QUALITY  IN 
BOOKS 


THE   TEST  OF  QUALITY   IN 
BOOKS ^ 

The  total  result  of  the  education  of  man- 
kind is  that  which  we  call  Civilization, 
meaning  progress  toward  the  finer  fitting 
of  men  and  women  for  life  in  the  social 
state.  Most  of  us  are  too  much  inclined, 
I  think,  to  measure  the  civilization  of  our 
own  day  by  its  science,  which  is  no  true 
measure  at  all.  The  science  of  the  pre- 
sent age  has  grown  to  be  very  wonderful ; 
but,  much  as  it  may  excite  us  to  aston- 
ishment, there  are  fruits  of  civilization, 
even  in  this  crude  period  (and  it  is  very 
crude),  which  command  our  admiration 
more.  The  finest  and  most  beautiful 
human  products  of  the  time,  whom  even 
the  Philistines  would  join  us  in  choosing 

1  From  some  remarks  to  the  Library  School  at 
the  New  York  State  Library,  in  May,  1895. 


42  THE  TEST   OF 

for  honor,  as  exemplars  to  their  genera- 
tion, might  not  pass  an  examination  in 
physics  or  biology.  They  are  the  men 
and  women,  sweet  with  the  sweetness  and 
luminous  with  the  light  which  Matthew 
Arnold  never  tired  of  extolling,  who  re- 
present that  side  of  civilization  which  is 
refinement  more  than  knowledge,  or 
which  is  knowledge  refined.  I  ^eak 
wrongly,  however,  when  I  say  of  that  re- 
finement that  it  is  one  side  of  civilization  ; 
for  it  is  civilization,  and  all  science  that 
lacks  it  is  barbaric,  even  though  steam 
engines  and  the  dynamos  of  Niagara  are 
shaking  the  earth  at  its  command. 

Now,  the  refinements  of  life  come 
chiefly  from  its  pleasures.  That  is  true  to 
an  extent  that  is  sure  to  surprise  us  when 
we  think  of  it  first.  Unfortunately,  it  is 
no  less  true  that  the  meaner  influences 
which  vitiate  and  vulgarize  life,  making 
it  gross  and  coarse,  come  from  the  plea- 
sure side  of  existence,  too.  There  the 
main  sources  of  the  two  are  together  :  on 


QUALITY  IN   BOOKS         43 

one  hand,  the  springs  of  all  art,  —  music, 
poetry,  romance,  drama,  sculpture,  paint- 
ing, —  brimmed  with  delights  of  the  im- 
agination and  the  joy  of  the  beauty  of 
the  world  ;  on  the  other  hand,  the  muddy 
wells  into  which  so  many  people  choose 
perversely  to  dip.  From  these  two  foun- 
tains of  pleasure-giving  art,  one  polluted 
and  the  other  pure,  the  differing  streams 
are  ever  flowing.  Which  of  them  has 
floated  to  us  an  offered  book  of  entertain- 
ment is  what  we  must  know,  if  we  can. 

Whether  the  book  is  alive  with  genius 
or  dead  with  the  lack  of  it,  —  whether  it 
is  brilliant  or  commonplace,  —  whether 
clumsiness  or  skill  is  in  the  construction 
of  it,  —  are  not  the  first  questions  to  be 
asked.  The  prior  question,  as  I  conceive, 
is  this  :  Does  the  book  leave  any  kind  of 
wholesome  and  fine  feeling  in  the  mind 
of  one  who  reads  it  ?  That  is  not  a  ques- 
tion concerning  the  mere  morality  of  the 
book,  in  the  conventional  meaning  of  the 
term.   It  touches  the  whole  quality  of  the 


44  THE  TEST   OF 

work  as  one  of  true  literature.  "  Does 
It  leave  any  kind  of  wholesome  and  fine 
feeling  in  the  mind  of  one  who  reads  it  ?  " 
There  is  no  mistaking  a  feeling  of  that 
nature,  though  it  may  never  seem  twice 
the  same  in  our  experience  of  it.  Some- 
times it  may  be  to  us  as  though  we  had 
eaten  of  good  food  ;  at  other  times  like 
the  tasting  of  wine  ;  at  others,  again,  like 
a  draught  of  water  from  a  cool  spring. 
Some  books  that  we  read  will  make  us 
feel  that  we  are  lifted  as  on  wings  ;  some 
will  make  music  within  us  ;  some  will 
give  us  visions  ;  some  will  just  fill  us  with 
a  happy  content.  In  such  feelings  there 
is  a  refining  potency  that  seems  to  be 
equaled  in  nothing  else.  The  simplest 
art  is  as  sure  to  produce  them  as  the  high- 
est. We  take  them  from  Burns's  lines 
"  To  a  Field-Mouse,"  from  Wordsworth's 
"  Poor  Susan,"  from  the  story  of  Ruth, 
from  the  story  of  "  The  Vicar  of  Wake- 
field," from  the  story  of  "  Picciola,"  from 
the  story  of  "  Daddy  Darwin's  Dovecot," 


QUALITY  IN   BOOKS         45 

as  certainly  as  from  "  Hamlet"  or  from 
"  Henry  Esmond."  The  true  pleasure, 
the  fine  pleasure,  the  civilizing  pleasure 
to  be  drawn  from  any  form  of  art  is  one 
which  leaves  a  distinctly  wholesome  feel- 
ing of  some  such  nature  as  these  that  I 
have  tried  to  describe ;  and  the  poem,  the 
romance,  the  play,  the  music,  or  the  pic- 
ture, which  has  nothing  of  the  sort  to 
give  us,  but  only  a  moment  of  sensation 
and  then  blankness,  does  us  no  kind  of 
good,  however  innocent  of  positive  evil 
it  may  be. 

If  the  wholesome  feeling  which  all  true 
art  produces,  in  literature  or  elsewhere,  is 
unmistakable,  so,  too,  are  those  feelings 
of  the  other  nature  which  works  of  an  op- 
posite character  give  rise  to.  Our  minds 
are  as  sensitive  to  a  moral  force  of  gravi- 
tation as  our  bodies  are  sensitive  to  the 
physical  force,  and  we  are  as  conscious 
of  the  downward  pull  upon  us  of  a  vulgar 
tale  or  a  vicious  play  as  we  are  conscious 
of  the  buoyant  lift  of  one  that  is  nobly 


46  THE  TEST   OF 

written.  We  have  likewise  a  mental 
touch,  to  which  the  texture  of  coarse  lit- 
erature is  a  fact  as  distinct  as  the  grit 
in  a  muddy  road  that  we  grind  with  our 
heels.  And  so  I  will  say  again  that  the 
conclusive  test  for  a  book  which  offers 
pleasure  rather  than  knowledge  is  in  the 
question,  **  Does  it  leave  any  kind  of 
wholesome  and  fine  feeling  in  the  mind 
of  one  who  reads  it  ?  " 

All  this  which  I  am  saying  is  opposed 
to  a  doctrine  preached  in  our  day,  by  a 
school  of  pretenders  in  art,  whose  chat- 
ter has  made  too  much  impression  on 
careless  minds.  It  appeared  first,  I  be- 
lieve, among  the  painters,  in  France,  and 
French  literature  took  infection  from  it ; 
then  England  became  somewhat  diseased, 
and  America  is  not  without  peril.  It  is 
the  false  doctrine  which  phrases  itself  in 
the  meaningless  motto  —  "  Art  for  Art's 
sake  !  "  "  Pursue  Art  for  Art's  sake,"  — 
"  Enjoy  Art  for  Art's  sake,"  cry  these 
aesthetic  prophets,  who  have  no  compre- 


QUALITY  IN   BOOKS         47 

hension  of  what  Art  is.  As  well  talk  of 
sailing  a  ship  for  the  ship's  sake,  —  of 
wheeling  a  cart  for  the  cart's  sake,  —  of 
articulating  words  for  the  words'  sake. 
Art  is  a  vessel,  a  vehicle,  for  the  carriage 
and  communication  of  something  from 
one  mind  to  another  mind,  —  from  one 
soul  to  another  soul.  Without  a  content, 
it  has  no  more  reason  for  its  being  than 
a  meaningless  word  could  have  in  human 
speech-  C'^nsidered  in  itself  and  for  its 
own  sake,  it  has  no  existence  ;  it  is  an 
imposture  —  a  mere  simulation  of  Art ; 
for  that  which  would  be  Art,  if  filled  duly 
with  meanings  and  laden  with  a  mes- 
sage, is  then  but  an  artisan's  handicraft. 
The  truth  is,  there  are  cunning  deceits 
in  this  pretension  to  "  Art  for  Art's  sake." 
Those  who  lead  the  cry  for  it  do  not 
mean  what  their  words  seem  to  imply. 
They  do  not  mean  the  emptiness  that  one 
might  suppose.  What  they  do  mean,  as 
a  rule,  is  to  put  something  ignoble  in  the 
place  of  what  should  be  noble ;  some- 


48    TEST  OF  QUALITY  IN  BOOKS 

thing  vulgar  or  something  vile  in  the 
place  of  what  should  be  wholly  pure  and 
wholly  fine.  What  they  really  strive  to 
do  is  to  degrade  the  content  of  Art,  and 
to  persuade  the  world  that  it  can  be  made 
the  vehicle  of  mean  ideals  without  ceasing 
to  be  Art  in  the  noble  sense.  The  work- 
ers to  that  end  in  literature  are  very  busy, 
and  I  suggest  this  as  an  important  rule 
in  the  choosing  of  books  :  Beware  of  the 
literature  of  the  school  which  preaches 
"  Art  for  Art's  sake." 


Ill 

HINTS    AS   TO    READING 


A-   ' 


HINTS   AS   TO   READING^ 

I  MAY  take  for  granted,  in  what  I  say 
this  evening,  that  no  one  who  hears  me 
is  indifferent  to  what  Mr.  Maurice  has 
called  "  the  friendship  of  books,"  nor  re- 
quires to  be  persuaded  that  the  reading 
of  good  books  is  an  occupation  of  time 
so  delightful  and  so  profitable  that  hardly 
any  other  can  be  preferred  to  it.  I  may 
take  that  for  granted,  because  it  is  fair  to 
assume  that  no  one  who  feels  indifferent 
or  repugnant  to  books  would  come  to  hear 
them  talked  about.  And  I  am  glad  that 
it  is  so  ;  because  I  should  have  no  faith  to 
encourage  me  in  speaking  to  people  of 
that  mind.  I  should  not  hope  to  make 
books  appear  attractive  to  any  man  or 
any  woman  who  has  grown  to  maturity 
without  feeling  the  charm  of  them.  I 
*  From  a  lecture. 


52     HINTS  AS  TO   READING 

would  do  so  most  gladly  if  I  could ;  for 
not  many  misfortunes  appeal  to  me  more. 
To  know  nothing  of  the  friendship  that 
never  fails,  the  companionship  that  never 
tires,  the  entertainment  that  is  never  far 
to  seek  nor  costly  to  command,  the 
blessed  resource  that  can  save  every  pre- 
cious hour  of  life  from  the  dreadful  wick- 
edness of  *'  the  killing  of  Time,"  —  what 
poverty  is  greater  than  that  1 

Assuming  that  the  worth  and  the 
charm  of  books  are  undisputed  in  this 
company,  there  is  nothing  in  question 
here  except  the  discriminations  to  be  ex- 
ercised among  them.  I  am  to  offer  you 
such  suggestions  as  I  can  concerning  the 
reading  of  books  and  the  choice  of  books 
for  reading,  XFor  reading,  be  it  remem- 
bered, not  for  study.  The  distinction  be- 
tween readers  and  students  is  one  that  I 
wish  to  keep  in  mind.  The  student,  as 
we  think  of  him,  stands  for  the  scholar, 
to  whom  books  are  the  business  of  life, 
first  and  before  all  things,  —  fundamen- 


HINTS  AS  TO   READING     53 

tal,  —  implemental,  —  professional.  The 
reader,  on  the  other  hand,  has  something 
else  for  vocation  and  chief  employment, 
and  his  book  is  a  happy  incident,  which 
night  brings  to  him,  perhaps,  with  his 
slippers,  his  easy-chair,  and  his  lamp. 
What  he  asks  from  it  is  not  scholarship, 
but  a  well-rounded  knowledge,  —  a 
wholesome  culture,  —  a  quickened  im- 
agination, —  a  mind  nourished  and  re- 
freshed. We  may  all  be  readers,  even  to 
a  large,  broad  measure  of  the  term  ;  but 
not  many  can  be  students  and  scholars, 
in  the  completer  sense.  Yet  some  fraction 
of  true  scholarship  ought  to  be  perfected 
in  every  one. , 

And  this,  in  fact,  is  the  first  suggestion 
I  am  moved  to  make,  —  namely,  that, 
while  it  is  both  necessary  and  better  for 
the  majority  of  people  that  they  should 
be  readers  of  books  in  a  general  way, 
rather  than  students  and  specialists  of 
learning,  it  is  better  still  that  the  reading 
of  each  one  should  range  with  wide  free- 


54     HINTS   AS   TO   READING 

dom  round  some  centre  of  actual  study, 
some  chapter  of  history,  some  question, 
some  language,  some  work  or  some  per- 
sonality in  literature,  —  it  scarcely  mat- 
ters what,  so  long  as  a  little  definite 
province  of  knowledge  is  really  occupied 
and  possessed,  while  larger  territories 
around  it  are  only  reconnoitred  and  over- 
run. I  say  it  is  better  for  the  majority  of 
people  that  they  should  be  readers  in  a 
general  way,  rather  than  students,  be- 
cause they  have  not  the  leisure  nor  the 
freedom  of  mind  for  large  subjects  of 
study,  and  it  is  ill  for  the  mind  to  focus 
it  on  small  themes  too  exclusively. 
Among  teachers  and  original  investi- 
gators the  specialization  of  learning  be- 
comes every  day  more  necessary,  as  the 
bulk  of  science  increases  ;  but  every  spe- 
cialist puts  his  soul  in  peril,  so  to  speak, 
by  the  risk  of  narrowed  faculties  and  an 
intellectual  myopia  to  which  he  is  ex- 
posed. So  I  would  not,  for  my  own  part, 
give  a  word  of  encouragement  to  that 


HINTS  AS  TO   READING     55 

growing  class  of  people  who  may  be 
called  the  class  of  amateur  specialists  ;  be- 
cause their  exclusive  devotion  to  special 
subjects  seems  too  little  and  too  much; — 
too  little,  that  is,  for  any  service  to  human 
knowledge,  and  too  much  for  the  best 
development  of  themselves.  I  feel  no 
doubt,  in  the  least,  that  breadth  of  culture 
is  more  important,  on  the  whole,  than  its 
depth,  to  the  generality  of  mankind  ;  that 
their  character  and  capability  as  mem- 
bers of  society  are  affected  more  by  the 
area  of  their  knowledge  and  by  the  diver- 
sity of  their  acquaintance  with  good  lit- 
erature, than  by  the  minuteness  of  either. 
At  the  same  time,  I  would  urge,  as  I 
say,  the  specializing  of  some  object  in  the 
intellectual  pursuits  of  every  man  and 
woman ;  not  to  the  exclusion  of  other 
subjects  and  objects,  but  to  their  subor- 
dination. Let  there  be  one  thing  for  each 
of  us  that  we  try  to  know  somewhere 
nearly  to  the  bottom,  with  certainty,  pre- 
cision, exactness ;  not  so  much  for  the 


56     HINTS   AS   TO   READING 

value  of  the  knowledge  itself,  as  for  the 
value  of  the  discipline  of  thoroughness. 
If  it  is  something  in  the  line  of  our  daily 
occupations,  —  something  bearing  upon 
our  particular  work  in  the  world,  me- 
chanical, commercial,  professional,  what- 
ever it  maybe,  —  so  much  the  better. 
Then,  around  that  one  centre  of  positive 
study,  turning  on  it  as  on  a  pivot,  let 
there  be  circle  after  circle  drawn  of  wide 
discursive  reading. 

If  this  seems  to  be  a  doctrine  that  is 
too  indulgent  of  easy  habits  in  reading, 
and  too  favorable  to  superficiality,  I  will 
hasten  to  introduce  a  second  suggestion 
which  cannot  be  so  suspected.  It  shall 
be  more  than  a  suggestion,  for  I  would 
make  it  a  very  serious  admonition  and 
injunction  to  all  who  will  give  atten- 
tion to  me  on  this  subject :  Be  temperate 
in  Newspapers  !  For  there  is  an  intem- 
perance in  the  newspaper-reading  of  the 
day  which  looks  nearly  as  threatening  to 
me  as  the  intemperance  that  is  fed  from 


HINTS  AS  TO   READING     57 

the  brewery  and  the  still.  To  a  certain 
extent,  —  and  I  would  not  be  narrow  in 
measuring  it,  —  good  newspapers  are  to 
be  rated  with  good  books,  and  even  be- 
fore them  in  one  view,  because  no  other 
reading  is  so  indispensable  to  the  edu- 
cation that  accords  with  the  conditions 
of  life  at  the  present  day.  I  value  as 
highly  as  one  reasonably  can  the  wonder- 
ful news-knowledge  of  our  time.  It  is 
sweeping  so  much  pettiness,  so  much 
small  provincialism,  out  of  the  feeling  and 
thinking  of  men,  making  them  cosmo- 
politan, cooperative,  tolerant !  With  the 
whole  world  gathered  into  one  neighbor- 
hood, so  to  speak,  and  the  daily  story  of 
its  doings  and  happenings  made  the  talk 
of  the  breakfast-table,  morning  by  morn- 
ing, and  the  chat  of  the  club  and  the  sit- 
ting-room evening  by  evening  ;  with  the 
calamities  of  Asia,  the  catastrophes  of 
the  South  Sea,  the  tragedies  of  Muscovy, 
the  agitations  of  Paris,  the  politics  of 
London,  the  sensations   of  New  York, 


58     HINTS  AS  TO   READING 

poured  hourly  into  our  consciousness, 
along  with  the  passing  events  of  our  own 
lives  and  of  the  little  circles  in  which  we 
revolve,  —  how  can  we  fail  to  outgrow 
in  our  sympathies  and  ideas  the  provin- 
cial boundaries  that  were  hard  and  fast 
for  earlier  men  ?  It  is  a  mighty  factor  in 
modem  education,  this  flying  world-news 
that  takes  wings  from  the  daily  press  and 
is  gathered  from  the  uttermost  parts  of 
the  earth. 

But  the  staple  of  it,  after  all,  is  gossip  ; 
—  world-gossip,  to  be  sure,  —  history- 
gossip  in  great  part,  —  hvX  gossip^  ne\'er- 
theless  ;  and  overmuch  of  it  is  thin  nour- 
ishment for  any  robust  and  capable  mind. 
Unwholesome,  too,  as  well  as  thin.  There 
is  a  kind  of  moral  narcotism  common 
to  every  species  of  gossip,  high  or  low, 
which  takes  possession,  like  an  opium- 
habit,  of  the  minds  that  are  much  given 
to  it,  and  works  degeneracy  in  them. 
Who  can  mistake  the  morbid  effects  in 
that  direction  which  appear  in  the  news- 


HINTS  AS  TO   READING     59 

paper-reading  world,  and  which  seem 
to  be  magnified  from  day  to  day  ?  The 
craving  for  coarser  flavors  in  the  news- 
reports  ;  for  more  pungency  of  sensation ; 
more  photography  of  vice  ;  more  dram- 
atization of  crime  ;  more  puerile  person- 
ality ;  more  spying  and  eaves-dropping  ; 
more  invasion  and  desecration  of  the  pri- 
vacies and  sacred  things  of  life  ;  —  that 
insatiable  craving,  which  popular  jour- 
nalism panders  to,  seems  to  have  an  in- 
cessant growth  from  what  it  feeds  on, 
and  one  shudders  in  imagining  the  pitch 
of  enterprise  and  audacity  to  which  re- 
porters may  yet  be  pushed  by  it.  The 
fault  is  no  more  than  half  on  the  side  of 
the  newspapers  ;  it  belongs  as  much,  or 
more,  to  the  readers  for  whose  taste  the 
popular  newspapers  are  made  up  ;  and  I 
am  convinced  that,  if  we  track  home  this 
disease  of  taste  which  is  gluttonous  of  the 
garbage  of  news,  we  shall  find  it  mostly 
among  people  whose  sole  literature  is 
from  the  daily  and  hebdomadal  press ; 


6o     HINTS   AS  TO   READING 

who  read  newspapers  and  nothing  else. 
They  constitute  a  great  class,  and  I  fear 
it  is  a  growing  class,  —  in  this  country- 
more,  perhaps,  than  in  any  other.  We  are 
called  "a  reading  people  ;  "  but  a  news- 
paper-reading people  may  be  the  truer 
description  ;  and  neither  we  nor  our  news- 
papers, as  I  have  tried  to  indicate,  are  im- 
proved by  the  excess  of  interest  in  them. 
Let  us  read  the  news  of  the  day,  by 
all  means.  Let  us  never  fail  to  keep 
abreast  of  it,  in  fair  acquaintance  with  the 
current  movements  of  event  and  opinion, 
maintaining  and  cultivating  a  healthy 
interest  in  the  affairs  of  the  world,  great 
and  small,  and  in  the  doing,  feeling,  and 
thinking  of  our  living  fellow  men.  But 
let  us  be  temperate  in  it ;  let  us  not 
saturate  ourselves  with  the  sensations  of 
the  passing  day.  Let  us  reserve  some 
room  in  our  minds  for  a  knowledge  of 
the  past,  its  ideas  and  its  history,  and  of 
present  things  that  are  not  caught  by  the 
reporter's  pencil  or  the  editor's  pen. 


HINTS  AS  TO   READING     6i 

I  have  placed  intemperance  in  news- 
paper-reading even  before  intemperance 
in  novel-reading,  because  I  look  upon  it 
as  the  more  serious  of  the  two  ;  but  the 
latter  is  a  very  grave  evil,  contributing 
to  a  mental  and  moral  debility  which  we 
must  not  treat  lightly.  Understand  that 
I  speak  only  of  intemperance  in  novel- 
reading,  or  of  intemperance  and  ill-selec- 
tion together ;  for  I  am  not  of  those  who 
despise  the  novel,  or  condemn  it  in  a 
sweeping  way.  In  my  view  it  has  its 
place  among  the  higher  forms  of  litera- 
ture, —  of  literature  as  art,  —  and  so  far 
as  it  is  made  fitting  to  that  high  place, 
by  the  genius  which  has  a  right  to  create 
it,  the  novel  is  a  gift  to  be  welcomed  and 
enjoyed.  In  the  reading  of  a  young  per- 
son I  would  not  withhold  a  fair  —  even  a 
liberal  —  proportion  of  wholesome  and 
finely  woven  romance.  We  must  not  be 
of  the  school  of  the  Gradgrinds.  Some 
nutriment  is  demanded  for  our  souls  be- 
sides the  nutriment  of  facts.   The  intel- 


62     HINTS  AS  TO   READING 

lectual  life  is  not  all  remembering,  or  all 
reckoning  and  reasoning.  It  includes 
feeling  and  imagination,  and  we  need  to 
cultivate  that  side  of  our  nature  no  less 
than  the  other,  for  a  rounded,  sane  devel- 
opment of  ourselves.  We  need  to  culti- 
vate it,  moreover,  by  other  means  and 
from  other  sources  than  books.  Nature, 
to  those  who  read  her,  is  more  eloquent 
than  any  poem ;  and  no  love-tale  is  so 
interesting  as  the  every-day  life  that  we 
have  under  our  eyes.  Yet  the  poetry  and 
romance  in  books  have  a  singular  impor- 
tance in  this  region  of  culture,  because, 
if  we  choose  them  well,  they  can  bring 
to  us  the  reinforcement  of  imaginations 
that  are  greater  than  our  own,  and  touch 
us  through  sensibilities  and  sympathies 
that  are  finer  than  we  possess.  If  they  do 
not  that,  they  can  do  us  no  good,  and 
we  may  better  leave  them  unread. 

What  I  say  of  romance  need  only  be 
writ  larger  for  poetry,  and  it  is  equally 
true.    A  true  poem  —  the  simplest  true 


HINTS   AS  TO   READING     63 

poem  —  will  bring  something  to  us  that 
is  a  revelation ;  some  glimpse  that  we 
never  had  before  of  a  meaning  in  things 
that  lights  them  up  to  us  ;  or  some  thrill 
of  an  emotion  which  attunes  us  in  newly 
felt  relations  with  God,  or  Nature,  or  Man. 
There  is  no  true  poetry  which  does  not 
that ;  and  the  idle  rhyme  that  has  only 
the  lilt  in  it  of  a  few  dancing  words,  or 
the  sparkle  of  a  few  trifling  fancies,  will 
defraud  us  of  the  time  spent  in  reading 
it.  Read  pure,  true  poetry,  as  you  would 
open  your  window  on  a  morning  in 
June  ;  as  you  would  walk  in  a  garden 
when  the  flowers  are  spread,  or  into  the 
fields  when  the  corn  is  ripe ;  as  you  would 
go  up  to  the  mountains,  or  out  on  the 
shore  of  the  sea.  Go  to  it  for  the  light 
and  the  gladness  and  the  bloom  of  beauty 
and  the  larger  horizons  and  the  sweeter 
atmosphere  you  can  find  in  it,  for  the 
rest  and  refreshment  and  revivifying  of 
your  souls. 

What  is  not  read  for  the  kinds  of  prac- 


64     HINTS   AS  TO    READING 

tical  knowledge  that  we  call  m/ormation 
is  to  be  read  for  some  such  good  to  one's 
soul,  if  there  is  anything  of  worth  in  its 
print.  Facts  for  our  store  of  practical 
knowledge  ;  teachings  and  exercises  for 
our  understanding  and  reason  ;  illumin- 
ation and  inspiration  for  the  spiritual- 
ities that  are  in  us  ;  wholesome  stimulants 
for  our  lighter  sensibilities,  of  fancy  and 
of  humor  and  the  like,  —  these  are  the 
differing  kinds  of  good  for  which  we  can 
go  to  books,  and  one  or  the  other  of 
which  we  should  require  them  to  supply. 
We  know  when  they  answer  the  demand ; 
generally  we  know  when  they  fail. 
Teachings,  illuminations,  inspirations, 
are  unmistakable  experiences  of  mind  ; 
but  the  wholesome  gratifications  of  fancy 
and  humor  are  not  always  so  distinguish- 
al)le  from  the  unwholesome,  and  it  is 
there  that  the  flood  of  modern  fiction 
brings  difficulty  into  the  question  of 
books.  It  is  a  difficulty  which  each 
reader  must  prepare  to  overcome,  in  the 


HINTS  AS  TO   READING     65 

main,  for  himself.  The  discriminating 
sense  —  the  feeling  for  what  is  good 
and  for  what  is  not  good  in  the  vast  out- 
put of  novel-writing  at  the  present  day 
—  can  be  trained  by  exercising  it  on  the 
undisputed  classics  of  fiction  that  we  in- 
herit from  the  past.  One  who  reads  Cer- 
vantes, Defoe,  Scott,  Dickens,  Thack- 
eray, George  Eliot,  Charles  Kingsley, 
Erckmann-Chatrian,  and  others  of  the 
"  old  masters  "  of  romance,  till  they  have 
grooved  habits  of  taste  in  his  mind,  is  not 
likely  to  be  cheated  by  any  prentice- 
work,  tricked  out  in  later  styles. 

And  the  more  substantial  literature,  — 
the  concrete  literature  of  fact,  —  what 
shall  I  say  of  that?  I  am  not  here  to 
urge  people  into  this  course  of  reading 
or  that,  dictated,  as  the  counsel  would 
naturally  be,  by  my  own  inclinations  of 
taste.  There  can  be  no  kind  or  course 
of  reading  that  is  best  for  all.  The  bent 
of  each  mind  is  to  be  yielded  to ;  not 
wholly,  but  so  far  as  will  determine  the 


66     HINTS   AS   TO   READING 

main  direction  pursued  :  as  to  whether  it 
shall  be  in  history,  or  travel,  or  natural 
science,  or  social  science,  or  philosophy, 
or  art.  Embarrassed  as  we  are  by  the 
multitude  and  variety  of  things  that  claim 
attention  in  the  world,  we  may,  any  of 
us,  neglect  philosophy,  or  the  arts,  or 
half  the  sciences  ;  but  we  musi  read  some- 
thing of  history,  if  we  are  to  understand  at 
all  the  stage  on  which  we  are  acting,  — 
the  plot  of  the  drama  of  life  in  which  we 
are  playing  parts,  —  the  world  and  the 
humanity  to  which  we  belong.  And  there 
are  some  suggestions  on  that  point  that  I 
am  glad  to  have  an  opportunity  to  make. 
First,  I  would  say,  give  a  little  atten- 
tion —  more  than  is  given  commonly  — 
to  the  background  of  history.  It  is  one 
of  the  discoveries  of  recent  times  that 
there  is  such  a  thing  as  a  background  to 
history.  Our  ancestors  knew  of  nothing 
behind  the  written  annals  of  mankind, 
e.xcept  the  mist-cloud  of  fables  from  which 
they  start.    For    us,    however,    there    is 


HINTS  AS  TO   READING     67 

accumulated  already  a  wonderful  body 
of  prehistoric  knowledge,  more  or  less 
conjecturable  and  debatable,  to  be  sure, 
but  exceedingly  significant,  nevertheless, 
throwing  flashes  of  light  into  the  dim 
dawns  of  civilization  and  society.  It  is 
made  up  of  a  multitude  of  hints  and  frag- 
ments of  fact,  picked  here  and  there  out 
of  the  roots  of  old  languages  and  the 
kitchen  -  heaps,  cave -relics,  and  burial- 
mounds  of  primitive  savage  men,  which 
are  found  to  have  surprising  meanings 
when  they  are  put  together  and  com- 
pared and  construed.  To  learn  what  we 
are  able  to  learn  from  them,  concerning 
the  early  divisions,  relations,  and  move- 
ments of  the  tribes  and  races  of  mankind, 
before  any  kind  of  written  record  was 
made,  or  any  name  or  personal  figure 
appears,  to  produce  for  us  the  first  dim 
picture  of  living  history,  is  to  acquire  a 
most  important  ground  of  understanding 
for  the  recorded  history  that  starts  out 
from  it  later  on. 


68     HINTS   AS  TO   READING 

Even  more  interesting  than  this  pre- 
historic background  is  what  may  be 
called  the  semi-historic  background 
which  lies  between  it  and  the  fairly- 
visible,  well-lighted  scenery  of  historic 
time.  That,  too,  is  a  discovery  of  our 
own  exploring  age.  Half  a  century  ago 
the  beginnings  of  the  most  dimly  known 
history  antedated  our  Christian  era  by 
little  more  than  two  thousand  yeafS. 
Now,  as  the  result  of  inquisitive  digging 
into  the  sand-covered  ruins  of  ancient 
cities  of  the  East,  where  civilization  and 
letters  had  their  birth,  we  are  reading 
messages  from  more  than  twice  that 
depth  in  the  pre-Christian  past ;  and  the 
story  of  the  most  ancient  world  has  not 
only  been  extended  but  retold.  It  has 
been  set  before  us  in  entirely  new  lights. 
In  a  thousand  particulars,  and  in  most 
of  the  meaning  it  had  to  modern  minds, 
the  old  understanding  of  it  is  found  to 
have  been  wrong.  We  who  were  read- 
ers of  ancient  history  as  it  was  written 


HINTS  AS  TO   READING     69 

half  a  century  ago  are  having  to  read  it 
and  learn  it  anew.  The  books  that  were 
classic  in  this  department  of  history  a 
generation  ago  —  and  they  include  the 
books  of  Biblical  exposition  and  illustra- 
tion, as  well  as  those  in  profane  history 
—  are  as  nearly  worthless  to-day  as  hon- 
est books  can  be  made.  Many  readers, 
I  fear,  are  not  clearly  conscious  of  that 
fact,  and  are  wasting  study  on  obsolete 
books.  The  parts  of  history  much  affected 
by  these  recent  discoveries  are  those 
which  touch  primitive  Egypt  and  west- 
ern Asia,  and  the  legendary  ages  of  the 
Greeks.  Otherwise,  the  literature  of  an- 
cient history  that  was  authoritative  and 
good  a  generation  ago  is  so,  for  the  most 
part,  now. 

This  reminds  me  to  repeat  a  word  of 
counsel  which  I  find  frequent  reason  to 
urge :  Take  your  history,  as  much  as 
possible,  from  the  greater  writers,  — 
from  the  historians  who  treat  it  in  the 
largest  way,  with  the  amplest  knowledge. 


70     HINTS  AS  TO   READING 

the  most  illuminating  thought,  the  clear- 
est style.  This  may  seem  uncalled-for 
advice,  but  it  is  not.  In  my  library  ex- 
perience I  have  encountered  many  people 
who  entertain  a  certain  fear  or  distrust 
of  the  really  great  historical  works. 
They  want,  as  they  say,  something  less 
learned,  less  elaborate,  —  something  sim- 
ple, comprehensive,  and  plain.  They 
think  it  will  be  easier  to  take  instruction 
from  one  volume  of  a  compiler  than  from 
half-a-dozen  of  a  great  original  work. 
They  make  a  very  serious  mistake.  The 
history  that  is  "  writ  large,"  from  full 
knowledge,  is  the  history  that  can  be 
made  easy  of  apprehension  and  delight- 
fully interesting  to  the  mind.  Those  who 
read  it  in  compends  and  compilations 
lose  its  flavors  ;  lose  the  taste  of  life  and 
living  people  in  it;  lose  its  organic  whole- 
ness, —  the  logic  and  the  lesson  of  it ; 
lose  most,  in  fact,  of  what  history  is  worth 
reading  for,  and  do  not  get  the  simplicity 
and  comj:)rehensiveness  they  sought. 


HINTS  AS  TO   READING     71 

At  the  same  time,  I  am  convinced  that 
it  is  well  to  prepare  for  the  large  reading 
of  any  part  of  history  by  etching  into  the 
mind,  as  it  were,  a  rough  outline  of  the 
whole  career  of  the  greater  races  of  man- 
kind, from  Egypt  and  Babylon  down  to 
Britain  and  America,  so  that,  whenever 
and  wherever  we  fill  in  the  details  by 
fuller  reading  of  this  and  that  national 
history  or  individual  biography,  the  parts 
will  adjust  themselves  in  their  relative 
places  and  be  correlated  properly  with 
each  other.  I  do  not  mean  by  this  to 
advise  the  general  reader  of  history  to 
cumber  his  mind  with  an  extensive  store 
of  precise  dates,  but  only  that  he  should 
establish  in  his  memory  a  fixed  and  firm 
association  of  the  epochs,  the  important 
movements  and  the  great  characters  that 
are  contemporaneous,  co-sequent  and  in- 
teractive in  different  regions  of  the  world. 
To  leave  this  chronological  framework 
of  historical  knowledge  to  be  pieced  to- 
gether as  one  goes  on  with  his  larger 


72     HINTS   AS   TO   READING 

reading  seems  to  me  a  mistake.  Better, 
I  sliould  say,  sit  down  with  a  good  epit- 
ome and  make  a  business  of  building 
the  main  sections  of  it  into  the  memory 
at  once. 

It  is  not  my  purpose  to  commend 
writers  or  writings  specifically ;  I  am 
simply  urging  fealty  to  the  indisputably 
bcsi,  which  do  not  need,  as  a  rule,  to  be 
advertised.  In  name,  at  least,  they  are 
marked  generally  by  common  fame.  If 
they  are  not  known  they  can  easily  be 
ascertained  ;  and  it  is  part  of  a  reader's 
training  to  learn  by  sedulous  inquiry 
what  is  the  superlative  literature  in  any 
field  he  may  approach. 


IV 

THE  MISSION  AND  THE  MIS- 
SIONARIES OF  THE  BOOK 


THE  MISSION  AND  THE  MIS- 
SIONARIES   OF   THE    BOOK/ 

For  the  most  part,  that  lifting  of  the 
human  race  in  condition  and  character 
which  we  call  civilization  has  been 
wrought  by  individual  energies  acting 
on  simply  selfish  lines.  When  I  say  this, 
I  use  the  term  selfish  in  no  sense  that  is 
necessarily  mean,  but  only  as  indicating 
the  unquestionable  fact  that  men  have 
striven,  in  the  main,  each  for  himself  more 
than  for  one  another,  even  in  those  striv- 
ings that  have  advanced  the  whole  race. 
Within  certain  limits  there  is  no  discredit 
to  human  nature  in  the  fact.  A  measure 
of  selfishness  is  prescribed  to  man  by 
the  terms  of  his  individuality  and  the 
conditions  of  his  life.    His  only  escape 

1  An  Address  at  the    University   Convocation 
(State  of  New  York),  in  June,  1896. 


76     THE   MISSION   AND  THE 

from  it  is  through  exertions  which  he 
must  employ  at  first  in  his  own  behalf,  in 
order  to  win  the  independence  and  the 
power  to  be  helpful  to  his  fellows.  So  it 
seems  to  me  quite  impossible  to  imagine 
a  process  that  would  have  worked  out 
the  civilization  of  the  race  otherwise  than 
by  the  self-pushing  energy  that  has  im- 
pelled individual  men  to  plant,  to  build, 
to  trade,  to  explore,  to  experiment,  to 
think,  to  plan,  primarily  and  immediately 
for  their  own  personal  advantage. 

But  if  the  more  active  forces  in  civili- 
zation are  mainly  from  selfish  springs, 
there  are  two,  at  least,  which  have  nobler 
sources  and  a  nobler  historic  part.  One 
is  the  sympathetic  impulse  which  repre- 
sents benevolence  on  its  negative  side, 
pained  by  the  misfortunes  of  others  and 
active  to  relieve  them.  In  the  second, 
which  is  more  rare,  we  find  benevolence 
of  the  positive  kind.  Its  spring  is  in  a 
purely  generous  feeling,  which  strongly 
moves    one    to    communicate    to  others 


MISSIONARIES  OF  THE  BOOK    77 

some  good  which  is  precious  to  him  in 
his  own  experience  of  it.  It  is  a  feeling 
which  may  rise  in  different  minds  from 
different  estimates  of  good,  and  be 
directed  toward  immediate  objects  that 
are  unlike,  but  the  disinterested  motive 
and  ultimate  aim  are  unvarying,  and  it 
manifests  in  all  cases  the  very  noblest 
enthusiasm  that  humanity  is  capable  of. 
There  seems  to  be  no  name  for  it  so  true 
as  that  used  when  we  speak  of  a  mission- 
ary spirit,  in  efforts  that  aim  at  the  shar- 
ing of  some  greatly  cherished  good  with 
people  who  have  not  learned  that  it  is 
good.  At  the  same  time  we  must  re- 
member that  mere  propagandisms  put 
on  the  missionary  garb  without  its  spirit, 
and  spuriously  imitate  its  altruistic  zeal ; 
and  we  must  keep  our  definition  in 
mind. 

There  are  always  true  missionaries  in 
the  world,  laboring  with  equally  pure 
hearts,  though  with  minds  directed  to- 
ward many  different  ends  of  benefaction 


78     THE   MISSION   AND   THE 

to  their  fellows.  But  only  two  objects  — 
the  spiritual  good  of  mankind,  contem- 
plated in  religious  beliefs,  and  the  intel- 
lectual good,  pursued  in  educational 
plans  —  have  ever  wakened  the  mission- 
ary spirit  in  a  large,  world-moving  way. 
The  supremely  great  epochs  in  human 
history  are  those  few  which  have  been 
marked  by  mighty  waves  of  altruistic  en- 
thusiasm, sweeping  over  the  earth  from 
sources  of  excitation  found  in  one  or  the 
other  of  these  two  ideals  of  good. 

Naturally  the  first  wakening  was  under 
the  touch  of  beliefs  which  contemplate  a 
more  than  earthly  good  ;  and  those  be- 
liefs have  moved  the  missionary  spirit  at 
ail  times  with  the  greatest  passion  and 
power.  But  even  the  religious  wakening 
was  not  an  early  event  in  history.  I  think 
I  may  safely  say  that  no  trace  of  it  is  to 
be  found  among  the  worshipers  of  remote 
antiquity.  The  Hebrew  prophets  never 
labored  as  dispensers  of  a  personal  bless- 
ing from  their  faith.    It  was  for  Israel,  the 


MISSIONARIES  OF  THE  BOOK    79 

national  Israel,  that  they  preached  the 
claims  and  declared  the  requirements  of 
the  God  of  Israel.  The  priests  of  Osiris 
and  Bel  were  still  more  indifferent  to  the 
interest  of  the  worshiper  in  the  worship 
of  their  gods,  thinking  only  of  the  honor 
demanded  by  the  gods  themselves.  So 
far  as  history  will  show,  the  first  mission- 
ary inspiration  would  seem  to  have  been 
brought  into  religion  by  Gotama,  the 
Buddha,  whose  pure  and  exalted  but 
enervating  gospel  of  renunciation  filled 
Asia  with  evangelists,  and  was  carried  to 
all  peoples  as  the  message  of  a  hope  of 
deliverance  from  the  universal  sorrow  of 
the  world.  Then,  centuries  later,  came 
the  commission  more  divine  which  sent 
forth  the  apostles  of  Christianity  to  tell 
the  story  of  the  Cross  and  to  bear  the 
offer  of  salvation  to  every  human  soul. 
As  religiously  kindled,  the  missionary 
spirit  has  never  burned  with  more  fervor 
than  it  did  in  the  first  centuries  of  Chris- 
tian preaching;  but  nothing  akin  to  it 


8o     THE   MISSION   AND   THE 

was  set  aflame  in  the  smallest  degree  by 
any  other  eagerness  of  desire  for  the  com- 
munication of  a  blessing  or  good  to  man- 
kind. Until  we  come  to  modern  times,  I 
can  see  no  mark  of  the  missionary  mo- 
tive in  any  labor  that  was  not  religious. 
The  one  object  which,  in  time,  as  I  have 
said,  came  to  rival  the  religious  object 
as  an  inspiration  of  missionary  work,  the 
modern  zeal  for  education,  was  late  and 
slow  in  moving  feelings  to  an  unselfish 
depth.  Enthusiasm  for  learning  at  the 
period  of  the  renaissance  was  enthusiasm 
among  the  few  who  craved  learning,  and 
was  expended  mostly  within  their  own 
circle.  There  was  little  thought  of  press- 
ing the  good  gift  on  the  multitude  who 
knew  not  their  loss  in  the  lack  of  it.  The 
earliest  great  pleader  for  a  common  edu- 
cation of  the  whole  people  was  Luther ; 
but  the  school  was  chiefly  important  in 
Luther's  view  as  the  nursery  of  the 
church  and  as  a  health-bringer  to  the 
state,  and  he  labored  for  it  more  as  a 


MISSIONARIES  OF  THE  BOOK    8i 

means  to  religious  and  political  ends  than 
as  an  end  in  itself.  Almost  a  century 
after  Luther  there  appeared  one  whom 
Michelet  has  called  "  the  first  evangelist 
of  modern  pedagogy,"  John  Amos  Co- 
menius,  the  Moravian.  The  same  thought 
of  him,  as  an  evangelist,  is  expressed  by 
the  historian  Raumer,  who  says :  "  Co- 
menius  is  a  grand  and  venerable  figure 
of  sorrow.  Wandering,  persecuted  and 
homeless  during  the  terrible  and  desolat- 
ing Thirty  Years'  War,  he  yet  never  de- 
spaired, but  with  enduring  truth  and 
strong  in  faith  he  labored  unweariedly  to 
prepare  youth  by  a  better  education  for  a 
better  future.  He  labored  for  them  with 
a  zeal  and  love  worthy  of  the  chief  of  the 
Apostles."  And  the  education  for  which 
Comenius  labored  was  no  less,  in  his  own 
words,  than  "  the  teaching  to  all  men 
of  all  the  subjects  of  human  concern." 
Proclaiming  his  educational  creed  at  an- 
other time,  he  said  :  "I  undertake  an 
organization  of  schools  whereby  all  the 


82     THE   MISSION   AND   THE 

youth  may  be  instructed  save  those  to 
whom  God  has  denied  intelligence,  and 
instructed  in  all  those  things  which  make 
man  wise,  good  and  holy." 

Here,  then,  had  arisen  the  first  true  mis- 
sionary of  common  teaching,  who  bore 
the  invitation  to  learning  as  a  gospel 
proffered  to  all  childhood  and  all  youth, 
and  who  strove  in  its  behalf  with  apostolic 
zeal.  The  period  of  the  active  labors  of 
Comenius  was  before  and  a  little  after 
the  middle  of  the  seventeenth  century. 
He  made  some  impression  upon  the  ideas 
and  the  educational  methods  of  his  time, 
but  Europe  generally  was  cold  to  his 
enthusiasm.  In  one  small  corner  of  it, 
alone,  there  was  a  people  already  pre- 
pared for  and  already  beginning  to  real- 
ize his  inspiring  dreams  of  universal  edu- 
cation. That  was  Holland,  where  the 
state,  even  in  the  midst  of  its  struggle 
for  an  independent  existence,  was  assum- 
ing the  support  of  common  schools  and 
attempting    to  provide  them  for   every 


MISSIONARIES  OF  THE  BOOK    83 

child.  In  that  one  spot  the  true  mission- 
ary leaven  in  education  was  found  work- 
ing while  the  seventeenth  century  was 
still  young,  and  from  Holland  it  would 
seem  to  have  been  carried  to  America 
long  before  the  fermentation  was  really 
felt  in  any  other  land. 

Elsewhere  in  the  Old  World,  if  Come- 
nius  found  any  immediate  successor  in  the 
new  field  of  missionary  labor  which  he 
had  practically  discovered  and  opened, 
it  was  the  Abbe  La  Salle,  founder  of  the 
great  teaching  order  of  the  Christian 
Brothers.  But  the  zeal  kindled  by  La 
Salle,  which  has  burned  even  to  the  pre- 
sent day,  was  essentially  religious  in  its 
aims  and  dedicated  to  the  service  of  his 
church.  The  spirit  in  common  teach- 
ing still  waited  generally  for  that  which 
would  make  a  secular  saving  faith  of  it, 
urgent,  persisting,  not  to  be  denied  or 
escaped  from.  The  world  at  large  made 
some  slow  progress  toward  better  things 
in  it ;  schools  were  increased  in  number 


84     THE   MISSION   AND   THE 

and  improved ;  Jesuits,  Jansenists,  Ora- 
torians  and  other  teaching  orders  in 
the  Roman  Church  labored  more  intelli- 
gently ;  middle-class  education  in  Eng- 
land and  other  countries  received  more 
attention.  But  the  conscience  of  society 
in  general  was  satisfied  with  the  open- 
ing of  the  school  to  those  who  came  with 
money  in  their  hands  and  knocked  at  its 
door.  There  was  no  thought  yet  of  stand- 
ing in  the  door  and  crying  out  to  the 
moneyless  and  to  the  indifferent,  bidding 
them  come.  Far  less  was  there  thought 
of  going  out  into  the  highways  and 
hedges  to  bring  them  in.  Another  cen- 
tury of  time  was  needed  and  a  long 
line  of  apostolic  teachers,  agitators,  and 
administrators,  like  Pestalozzi,  Father 
Girard,  Frobel,  Humboldt,  Brougham, 
Horace  Mann,  to  inspire  that  feeling  for 
education  which  warms  the  western  na- 
tions of  the  world  at  last :  the  feeling  for 
education  as  a  supreme  good  in  itself,  not 
merely  as  a  bread-making  or  a  money- 


MISSIONARIES  OF  THE  BOOK    85 

making  instrument ;  not  merely  for  giv- 
ing aritiimetic  to  the  shop-keeper,  or 
bookkeeping  to  the  clerk,  or  even  politi- 
cal opinions  to  the  citizen  ;  not  merely 
for  supplying  preachers  to  the  pulpit,  or 
physicians  to  the  sick-room,  or  lawyers 
to  the  bench  and  bar ;  but  in  and  of  and 
for  its  own  sake,  as  a  good  to  humanity 
which  surpasses  every  other  good,  save 
one.  This  is  what  I  call  the  missionary 
spirit  in  education,  and  it  has  so  far  been 
wakened  in  the  world  that  we  expect  and 
demand  it  in  the  teaching  work  of  our 
time,  and  when  we  do  not  have  it,  we  are 
cheated  by  its  counterfeit. 

But  this  zeal  for  education  was  ani- 
mated in  most  communities  sooner  than 
the  thought  needed  for  its  wise  direction. 
There  was  a  time  not  long  ago  when  it 
expended  itself  in  schoolrooms  and  col- 
leges and  was  satisfied.  To  have  laid  be- 
nignant hands  on  the  children  of  the  gen- 
eration and  pushed  them,  with  a  kindly 
coercion,   through  some  judicious   cur- 


86     THE   MISSION   AND   THE 

riculum  of  studies  was  thought  to  be 
enough.  That  Hmited  conception  of  edu- 
cation as  a  common  good  sufficed  for  a 
time,  but  not  long.  The  impulse  which 
carried  public  sentiment  to  that  length 
was  sure  to  press  questions  upon  it  that 
would  reach  farther  yet.  *'  Have  we  ar- 
rived," it  began  to  ask,  "at  the  end  for 
which  our  public  schools  are  the  means  ? 
We  have  provided  broadly  and  liberally 
—  for  what  ?  For  teaching  our  children  to 
read  their  own  language  in  print,  to  trace 
it  in  written  signs,  to  construct  it  in  gram- 
matical forms,  to  be  familiar  with  arith- 
metical rules,  to  know  the  standards  and 
divisions  of  weight  and  measure,  to  form 
a  notion  of  the  surface  features  of  the 
earth  and  to  be  acquainted  with  the 
principal  names  that  have  been  given  to 
them,  to  remember  a  few  chief  facts  in 
the  past  of  their  own  country.  But  these 
are  only  keys  which  we  expect  them  to 
use  in  their  acquisition  of  knowledge, 
rather  than  knowledge  itself.    When  they 


MISSIONARIES  OF  THE  BOOK    87 

quit  the  school  with  these  wonderful  keys 
of  alphabet  and  number  in  their  posses- 
sion, they  are  only  in  the  vestibule  cham- 
bers of  education.  Can  we  leave  them 
there,  these  children  and  youth  of  our 
time,  to  find  as  best  they  may,  or  not  find 
at  all,  the  treasuries  we  would  have  them 
unlock?"  To  ask  the  question  was  to 
answer  it.  Once  challenged  to  a  larger 
thought  of  education,  the  missionary  spirit 
of  the  age  rose  boldly  in  its  demands. 
The  free  school,  the  academy,  the  college 
even,  grew  in  importance  when  looked 
at  in  the  larger  view,  but  they  were  seen 
to  be  not  enough.  They  were  seen  to 
be  only  blessed  openings  in  the  way  to 
knowledge,  —  garlanded  gates,  ivory 
portals,  golden  doors,  but  passage-ways 
only,  after  all,  to  knowledge  beyond 
them.  And  the  knowledge  to  which  they 
led,  while  much  and  of  many  kinds  may 
need  to  be  gleaned  in  the  open  fields  of 
life,  out  of  living  observations  and  expe- 
riences, yet  mainly  exists  as  a  measure- 


88     THE   MISSION    AND   THE 

less  store  of  accumulated  savings  from 
the  experience  and  observation  of  al!  the 
generations  that  have  lived  and  died,  re- 
corded in  writing  and  preserved  in  print. 
There,  then,  in  the  command  and  posses- 
sion of  that  great  store,  the  end  of  edu- 
cation was  seen  to  be  most  nearly  real- 
ized ;  and  so  the  free  public  library  was 
added  to  the  free  public  school. 

But  strangely  enough,  when  that  was 
first  done,  there  happened  the  same  halt- 
ing of  spirit  that  had  appeared  in  the  free 
public  school.  To  have  collected  a  li- 
brarv^  of  books,  and  to  have  set  its  doors 
open  to  all  comers,  was  assumed  to  be 
the  fulfillment  of  duty  in  the  matter.  The 
books  waited  for  readers  to  seek  them. 
The  librarian  waited  for  inquirers  to  press 
their  way  to  him.  No  one  thought  of  out- 
spreading the  books  of  the  library  like  a 
merchant's  wares,  to  win  the  public  eye 
to  them.  None  thought  of  tr\ing  by  any 
mcrins  to  rouse  an  appetite  for  books  in 
minds  not  naturally  hungry  for  learning 


MISSIONARIES  OF  THE  BOOK    89 

or  poetry  or  the  thinking  of  other  men. 
So  the  free  or  the  nearly  free  pubUc  li- 
braries, for  a  time,  wrought  no  great  good 
for  education  beyond  a  circle  in  which 
the  energy  of  the  desire  to  which  they 
answered  was  most  independent  of  any 
public  help. 

But  this  stage  of  passive  existence  in 
the  life  of  the  free  public  library  had  no 
long  duration.  Soon  the  missionary  pas- 
sion began  to  stir  men  here  and  there  in 
the  library  field,  as  it  had  stirred  teach- 
ers in  the  schools  before.  One  by  one, 
the  inspiration  of  their  calling  began  to 
burn  in  their  hearts.  They  saw  with  new 
eyes  the  greatness  of  the  trust  confided 
to  them,  and  they  rose  to  a  new  sense 
of  the  obligations  borne  with  it.  No 
longer  a  mere  keeper,  custodian,  watch- 
man, set  over  dumb  treasures  to  hold 
them  safe,  the  librarian  now  took  active 
functions  upon  himself  and  became 
the  minister  of  his  trust,  commanded  by 
his  own  feelings   and  by  many  incen- 


90     THE   MISSION   AND   THE 

tives  around  him  to  make  the  most  in 
all  possible  ways  of  the  library  as  an  in- 
fluence for  good.  The  new  spirit  thus 
brought  into  library  work  spread  quickly, 
as  a  beneficent  epidemic,  from  New  Eng- 
land, where  its  appearance  was  first  no- 
tably marked,  over  America  and  Great 
Britain  and  into  all  English  lands,  and 
is  making  its  way  more  slowly  in  other 
parts  of  the  world. 

The  primary  effort  to  which  it  urged 
librarians  and  library  trustees  was  that 
toward  bettering  the  introduction  of 
books  to  readers  ;  toward  making  them 
known,  in  the  first  instance,  with  a  due 
setting  forth  of  what  they  are  and  what 
they  offer ;  then  toward  putting  them 
in  right  relations  with  one  another,  by 
groupings  according  to  subject  and  lit- 
erary form  and  by  cross-bindings  of 
reference  ;  then  toward  establishing  the 
easiest  possible  guidance  to  them,  both 
severally  and  in  their  groups,  for  all  seek- 
ers,  whether  simple  or  learned.    When 


MISSIONARIES  OF  THE  BOOK    91 

serious  attention  had  once  been  given  to 
these  matters  there  was  found  to  be  need 
in  them  of  a  measure  of  study,  of  experi- 
ment, of  inventive  ingenuity,  of  individ- 
ual and  collective  experience,  of  practical 
and  philosophical  attainments,  that  had 
never  been  suspected  before.  These  dis- 
coveries gave  form  to  a  conception  of 
"library  science,"  of  a  department  of 
study  that  is  entitled  to  scientific  rank 
by  the  importance  of  its  results,  the  pre- 
cision of  its  methods,  the  range  of  its  de- 
tails. The  quick  development  of  the  new 
science,  within  the  few  years  that  have 
passed  since  the  first  thought  of  it  came 
into  men's  minds,  is  marked  by  the  rise 
of  flourishing  library  schools  and  classes 
in  all  parts  of  the  United  States,  east  and 
west. 

For  more  efficiency  in  their  common 
work,  the  reformers  of  the  library  were 
organized  at  an  early  day.  The  American 
Library  Association  on  this  side  of  the 
sea  and  the  Library  Association  of  the 


92     THE   MISSION   AND   THE 

United  Kingdom  on  the  other  side,  with 
journals  giving  voice  to  each,  proved  pow- 
erful in  their  unifying  effect.  Ideas  were 
exchanged  and  experiences  compared. 
Each  was  taught  by  the  successes  or 
warned  by  the  failures  of  his  neighbors. 
What  each  one  learned  by  investigation 
or  proved  by  trial  became  the  property 
of  every  other.  The  mutual  instruction 
that  came  about  was  equaled  only  by 
the  working  cooperation  which  followed. 
Great  tasks,  beyond  the  power  of  indi- 
viduals, and  impossible  as  commercial 
undertakings,  because  promising  no  pe- 
cuniary reward,  were  planned  and  labori- 
ously performed  by  the  union  of  many 
coworkers,  widely  scattered  in  the  world, 
but  moved  by  one  disinterested  aim. 
From  one  hundred  and  twenty-two  libra- 
ries, in  that  mode  of  alliance,  there  was 
massed  the  labor  which  indexed  the  whole 
body  of  general  magazine  literature,  thus 
sweeping  the  dust  from  thousands  of  vol- 
umes that  had  been  practically  useless 


MISSIONARIES  OF  THE  BOOK    93 

before,  bringing  the  invaluable  miscel- 
lany of  their  contents  into  daily,  definite 
service,  by  making  its  subjects  known 
and  easily  traced.  The  same  work  of 
cooperative  indexing  was  next  carried 
into  the  indeterminate  field  of  general 
miscellaneous  books.  By  still  broader  co- 
operation, a  selection  of  books  was  made 
from  the  huge  mass  of  all  literature,  with 
siftings  and  resiftings,  to  be  a  standard 
of  choice  and  a  model  of  cataloguing  for 
small  new  libraries.  And  now  topical  lists 
on  many  subjects  are  being  prepared  for 
the  guidance  of  readers  by  specialists  in 
each  subject,  with  notes  to  describe  and 
value  the  books  named.  The  possibili- 
ties of  cooperation  in  library  work  are 
just  beginning  to  be  realized,  and  the 
great  tasks  accomplished  already  by  it 
will  probably  look  small  when  compared 
with  undertakings  to  come  hereafter. 

But,  after  all,  it  is  the  individual  work 
in  the  libraries  which  manifests  most  dis- 
tinctly the  new  spirit  of  the  time.   The 


94     THE  MISSION   AND   THE 

perfected  cataloguing,  which  opens  paths 
for  the  seeker  from  every  probable  start- 
ing-point of  inquiry,  not  only  to  books, 
but  into  the  contents  of  books  ;  the  mul- 
tiplied reading  lists  and  reference  lists 
on  questions  and  topics  of  the  day,  which 
are  quick  to  answer  a  momentary  inter- 
est in  the  public  mind  and  direct  it  to 
the  best  sources  for  its  satisfaction  ;  the 
annotated  bulletins  of  current  literature, 
which  announce  and  value  as  far  as 
practicable,  by  some  word  of  competent 
criticism,  the  more  important  publications 
of  each  month ;  the  opening  of  book- 
shelves to  readers,  to  which  libraries  are 
tending  as  far  as  their  constitution  and 
their  circumstances  will  permit ;  the  evo- 
lution of  the  children's  reading-room,  now 
become  a  standard  feature  to  be  provided 
for  in  every  new  building  design,  and  to 
be  striven  for  in  buildings  of  an  older 
pattern ;  the  invention  of  traveling  libra- 
ries and  home  libraries ;  the  increasing 
pr()\ision    made    in    library   service  for 


MISSIONARIES  OF  THE  BOOK    95 

helping  students  and  inquirers  to  pur- 
sue their  investigations  and  make  their 
searches  ;  the  increasing  cooperation  of 
Hbraries  and  schools,  with  the  growing 
attraction  of  teachers  and  pupils  toward 
the  true  literature  of  their  subjects  of 
study,  and  the  waning  tyranny  of  the 
dessicated  text-book  ;  in  all  these  things 
there  is  the  measure  of  an  influence  which 
was  hardly  beginning  to  be  felt  a  quarter 
of  a  century  ago. 

I  have  named  last  among  the  fruits  of 
this  potent  influence  the  cooperation  of 
libraries  and  schools,  not  because  it  stands 
least  in  the  list,  but  because  the  whole 
missionary  inspiration  from  every  stand- 
point of  solicitude  for  the  educational 
good  of  mankind  is  united  and  culminated 
in  it  and  is  doing  its  greatest  work.  The 
missionary  teacher  and  the  missionary 
librarian  come  together  in  these  new  ar- 
rangements, working  no  longer  one  in 
the  steps  of  the  other,  —  one  carrying 
forward  the  education  which  the  other 


96     THE   MISSION   AND   THE 

has  begun,  —  but  hand  in  hand  and  side 
by  side,  leading  children  from  the  earliest 
age  into  the  wonderful  and  beautiful  book- 
world  of  poetry,  legend,  story,  nature- 
knowledge,  or  science,  time-knowledge 
or  history,  life-knowledge  or  biography, 
making  it  dear  and  familiar  to  them  in 
the  impressionable  years  within  which 
their  tastes  are  formed.  The  school  alone, 
under  common  conditions,  can  do  no- 
thing of  that.  On  the  contrary,  its  text 
books,  as  known  generally  in  the  past, 
have  been  calculated  to  repel  the  young 
mind.  They  have  represented  to  it  little 
but  the  dry  task  of  rote-learning  and 
recitation.  They  have  brought  to  it  no- 
thing of  the  flavor  of  real  literature,  nor 
any  of  that  rapturous  delight  from  an 
inner  sense  of  rhythmic  motions  which 
real  literature  can  give :  neither  the 
dancing  step,  nor  the  swinging  march, 
nor  the  rush  as  with  steeds,  nor  the  lift 
and  sweep  as  with  wings,  which  even  a 
child  may  be  made  to  feel  in  great  poetry 


MISSIONARIES  OF  THE  BOOK    97 

and  in  noble  prose,  and  which  once  expe- 
rienced is  a  beguiling  charm  forever. 
The  whole  tendency  of  the  text-book 
teaching  of  school  is  toward  deadening 
the  young  mind  to  that  feeling  for  liter- 
ature, and  alienating  it  from  books  by  a 
prejudice  born  of  wrong  impressions  at 
the  beginning.  Just  so  far  as  the  school 
reader,  the  school  geography,  the  school 
history  and  their  fellow  compends,  are 
permitted  to  remain  conspicuous  in  a 
child's  thought  during  his  early  years,  as 
representative  of  the  books  which  he  will 
be  admonished  by  and  by  to  read,  so  far 
he  will  be  put  into  an  opposition  never 
easy  to  overcome. 

The  tenderest  years  of  childhood  are 
the  years  of  all  others  for  shaping  a  pure 
intellectual  taste  and  creating  a  pure  in- 
tellectual thirst  which  only  a  noble  liter- 
ature can  satisfy  in  the  end.  We  have 
come  at  last  to  the  discernment  of  that 
pregnant  fact,  and  our  schemes  of  edu- 
cation for  the  young  are  being  recon- 


98     THE   MISSION   AND   THE 

structed  accordingly.  There  is  no  longer 
the  division  of  labor  between  school  and 
library  which  seemed  but  a  little  time  ago 
to  be  marked  out  so  plainly.  Schools  are 
not  to  make  readers  for  libraries,  nor  are 
libraries  to  wait  for  readers  to  come  to 
them  out  of  the  schools.  The  school  and 
the  world  of  books  which  it  makes  known 
to  him  are  to  be  identified  in  the  child's 
mind.  There  is  to  be  no  distinction  in 
his  memory  between  reading  as  an  art 
learned  and  reading  as  a  delight  dis- 
covered. The  art  and  the  use  of  the  art 
are  to  be  one  simultaneous  communica- 
tion to  him. 

That  is  the  end  contemplated  in  the 
cooperative  work  of  libraries  and  schools, 
which,  recent  in  its  beginning,  has  made 
great  advances  already,  and  which  espe- 
cially appeals  to  what  I  have  called  the 
missionary  enthusiasm  in  both  libraries 
and  schools.  It  contemplates  what  seems 
to  be  the  truest  ideal  of  teaching  ever 
shaped  in  thought :  of  teaching  not  as 


MISSIONARIES  OF  THE  BOOK    99 

educating,  but  as  setting  the  young  in 
the  way  of  education ;  as  starting  them 
on  a  course  of  self-cuhure  which  they 
will  pursue  to  the  end  of  their  lives,  with 
no  willingness  to  turn  back.  The  high- 
est ideal  of  education  is  realized  in  that 
life-long  pursuit  of  it,  and  the  success 
of  any  school  is  measured,  not  by  the 
little  portion  of  actual  learning  which 
its  students  take  out  of  it,  but  by  the 
persisting  strength  of  the  impulse  to 
know  and  to  think,  which  they  carry 
from  the  school  into  their  later  lives. 

But  there  are  people  who  may  assent 
to  all  that  is  said  of  education  in  this  life- 
lasting  view  of  it,  who  will  deny  that  there 
is  a  question  in  it  of  books.  **  We,"  they 
say,  "  find  more  for  our  instruction  in  life 
than  in  books.  The  reality  of  things  in- 
terests us  more  and  teaches  us  more  than 
the  report  and  description  of  them  by 
others.  We  study  men  among  men  and 
God's  works  in  the  midst  of  them.  We 
prefer  to  take  knowledge  at  first  hand, 


lOO    THE   MISSION   AND  THE 

from  nature  and  from  society,  rather  than 
second-handedly,  out  of  a  printed  page. 
Your  book-wisdom  is  from  the  closet  and 
for  closet-use.  It  is  not  the  kind  needed 
in  a  busy  and  breezy  world."  Well,  there 
is  a  half-truth  in  this  which  must  not  be 
ignored.  To  make  everything  of  books 
in  the  development  of  men  and  women 
is  a  greater  mistake,  perhaps,  than  to 
make  nothing  of  them.  For  life  has  teach- 
ings, and  nature  out  of  doors  has  teach- 
ings, for  which  no  man,  if  he  misses  them, 
can  find  compensation  in  books.  We  can 
say  that  frankly  to  the  contemner  of 
books  and  we  yield  no  ground  in  doing 
so ;  for  then  we  turn  upon  him  and  say  : 
"  Your  life,  sir,  to  which  you  look  for  all 
the  enlightenment  of  soul  and  mind  that 
you  receive,  is  a  brief  span  of  a  fe\^  tens 
of  years  ;  the  circle  of  human  acquain- 
tances in  which  you  are  satisfied  to  make 
your  whole  study  of  mankind  is  a  little 
company  of  a  few  hundred  men  and 
women,  at  the  most ;  the  natural  world 


MISSIONARIES  OF  THE  BOOK   loi 

from  which  you  think  to  take  sufficient 
lessons  with  your  unassisted  eyes  is  made 
up  of  some  few  bits  of  city  streets  and 
country  lanes  and  seaside  sands.  What 
can  you,  sir,  know  of  life,  compared  with 
the  man  who  has  had  equal  years  of 
breath  and  consciousness  with  you,  and 
who  puts  with  that  experience  some  large, 
wide  knowledge  of  seventy  centuries  of 
human  history  in  the  whole  round  world 
besides  ?  What  can  you  know  of  man- 
kind and  human  nature  compared  with 
the  man  who  meets  and  talks  with  as 
many  of  his  neighbors  in  the  flesh  as 
yourself,  and  who,  beyond  that,  has  com- 
panionship and  communion  of  mind  with 
the  kingly  and  queenly  ones  of  all  the 
generations  that  are  dead?  What  can 
you  learn  from  nature  compared  with 
him  who  has  Darwin  and  Dana  and  Hux- 
ley and  Tyndall  and  Gray  for  his  tutors 
when  he  walks  abroad,  and  who,  besides 
the  home-rambling  which  he  shares  with 
you,    can   go  bird-watching   with  John 


I02    THE  MISSION   AND   THE 

Burroughs  up  and  down  the  Atlantic 
states,  or  roaming  with  Thoreau  in  Maine 
woods,  or  strolling  with  Richard  Jefferies 
in  English  lanes  and  fields?" 

Truth  is,  the  bookless  man  does  not 
understand  his  own  loss.  He  does  not 
know  the  leanness  in  which  his  mind 
is  kept  by  want  of  the  food  which  he 
rejects.  He  does  not  know  what  starving 
of  imagination  and  of  thought  he  has 
inflicted  upon  himself.  He  has  suffered 
his  interest  in  the  things  which  make  up 
God's  knowable  universe  to  shrink  until 
it  reaches  no  farther  than  his  eyes  can 
see  and  his  ears  can  hear.  The  books 
which  he  scorns  are  the  telescopes  and 
reflectors  and  reverberators  of  our  intel- 
lectual life,  holding  in  themselves  a  hun- 
dred magical  powers  for  the  overcoming 
of  space  and  time,  and  for  giving  the 
range  of  knowledge  which  belongs  to  a 
really  cultivated  mind.  There  is  no  equal 
substitute  for  them.  There  is  nothing  else 
which    will    so   break    for   us    the    poor 


MISSIONARIES  OF  THE  BOOK    103 

hobble  of  every-day  sights  and  sounds 
and  habits  and  tasks,  by  which  our  think- 
ing and  feeling  are  prone  to  be  tethered 
to  a  little  worn  round. 

Some  may  think,  perhaps,  that  news- 
papers should  be  named  with  books  as 
sharing  this  high  office.  In  truth,  it 
ought  to  be  possible  to  rank  the  news- 
paper with  the  book  as  an  instrument  of 
culture.  Equally  in  truth,  it  is  not  pos- 
sible to  do  so,  except  in  the  case  of  some 
small  number.  The  true  public  journal 
—  diary  of  the  world  —  which  is  actually 
a  news-pa.peT  and  not  a  ^-ossTp-pa-per,  is 
most  powerfully  an  educator,  cultivator, 
broadener  of  the  minds  of  those  who  read 
it.  It  lifts  them  out  of  their  petty  per- 
sonal surroundings,  and  sets  them  in  the 
midst  of  all  the  great  movements  of  the 
time  on  every  continent.  It  makes  them 
spectators  and  judges  of  everything  that 
happens  or  is  done,  demands  opinions 
from  them,  extorts  their  sympathy  and 
moves  them  morally  to  wrath  or  admi- 


I04    THE  MISSION   AND   THE 

ration.  In  a  word,  it  produces  daily,  in 
their  thought  and  feeling,  a  thousand 
large  relations  with  their  fellow  men  of 
every  country  and  race,  with  noble  re- 
sults of  the  highest  and  truest  culti- 
vation. 

But  the  common  so-called  newspaper 
of  the  present  day,  which  is  a  mere  rag- 
picker of  scandal  and  gossip,  searching 
the  gutters  and  garbage-barrels  of  the 
whole  earth  for  every  tainted  and  unclean 
scrap  of  personal  misdoing  or  mishap 
that  can  be  dragged  to  light ;  the  so-called 
newspaper  which  interests  itself,  and 
which  labors  to  interest  its  readers,  in  the 
trivialities  and  ignoble  occurrences  of  the 
day  —  in  the  prize  fights,  and  mean  pre- 
liminaries of  prize  fights,  the  boxing 
matches,  the  ball  games,  the  races,  the 
teas,  the  luncheons,  the  receptions,  the 
dresses,  the  goings  and  comings  and 
private  doings  of  private  persons  — 
making  the  most  in  all  possible  ways  of 
all   petty  things  and  low  things,   while 


MISSIONARIES  OF  THE  BOOK   105 

treating  grave  matters  with  levity  and 
impertinence,  with  what  effect  is  such 
a  newspaper  read?  I  do  not  care  to 
say.  If  I  spoke  my  mind  I  might  strike 
harshly  at  too  many  people  whose  read- 
ing is  confined  to  such  sheets.  I  will 
venture  only  so  much  remark  as  this  : 
that  I  would  prefer  absolute  illiteracy 
for  a  son  or  daughter  of  mine,  total  in- 
ability to  spell  a  printed  word,  rather 
than  that  he  or  she  should  be  habitually 
a  reader  of  the  common  newspapers  of 
America  to-day,  and  a  reader  of  nothing 
better. 

I  could  say  the  same  of  many  books. 
So  far,  in  speaking  of  books,  I  have  been 
taking  for  granted  that  you  will  under- 
stand me  to  mean,  not  everything  with- 
out discrimination  which  has  the  form  of 
a  book,  but  only  the  true  literature  which 
worthily  bears  that  printed  form.  For  if 
we  must  give  the  name  to  all  printed 
sheets,  folded  and  stitched  together  in  a 
certain  mode,  then  it  becomes  necessary 


io6    THE   MISSION   AND   THE 

to  qualify  the  use  we  make  of  the  name. 
Then  we  must  sweep  out  of  the  question 
vast  numbers  of  books  which  belong  to 
literature  no  more  than  a  counterfeit 
dollar  belongs  to  the  money  of  the  coun- 
try. They  are  counterfeits  in  literature, 
—  base  imitations  of  the  true  book ;  that 
is  their  real  character.  Readers  may  be 
cheated  by  them  precisely  as  buyers  and 
sellers  may  be  cheated  by  the  spurious 
coin,  and  the  detection  and  rejection  of 
them  are  effected  by  identically  the  same 
process  of  scrutiny  and  comparison. 
Every  genuine  book  has  a  reason  for  its 
existence,  in  something  of  value  which  it 
brings  to  the  reader.  That  something 
may  be  information,  it  may  be  in  ideas, 
it  may  be  in  moral  stimulations,  it  may  be 
in  wholesome  emotions,  it  may  be  in  gifts 
to  the  imagination,  or  to  the  fancy,  or  to 
the  sense  of  humor,  or  to  the  humane 
sympathies,  or  indefinably  to  the  whole 
conscious  contentment  of  the  absorbing 
mind ;  but  it  will  always  be  a  fact  which 


MISSIONARIES  OF  THE  BOOK   107 

those  who  make  themselves  familiar 
with  good  and  true  books  can  never 
mistake.  Whether  they  find  it  in  a  book 
of  history,  or  of  travel,  or  of  biography, 
or  of  piety,  or  of  science,  or  of  poetry, 
or  of  nonsense  (for  there  are  good  books 
of  nonsense,  like  "Alice  in  Wonder- 
land," for  example),  they  will  infallibly 
recognize  the  stamp  of  genuineness  upon 
it.  The  readers  who  are  cheated  by 
base  and  worthless  books  are  the  readers 
who  will  not  give  themselves  an  expert 
knowledge  of  good  books,  as  they  might 
easily  do. 

Here,  then,  opens  one  of  the  greater 
missionary  fields  of  the  public  library. 
To  push  the  competition  of  good  books 
against  worthless  books,  making  readers 
of  what  is  vulgar  and  flat  acquainted 
with  what  is  wholesome  and  fine,  is  a 
work  as  important  as  the  introduction 
of  books  among  people  who  have  never 
read  at  all.  There  is  a  theory  which  has 
some  acceptance,   that   aity  reading  is 


io8    THE   MISSION   AND  THE 

better  than  no  reading.  It  rests  on  the 
assumption  that  an  appetite  for  letters 
once  created,  even  by  the  trash  of  the 
press,  will  either  refine  its  own  taste  or 
else  will  have  prepared  a  susceptibility 
to  literary  influences  which  could  not 
otherwise  exist.  Those  who  hold  this 
doctrine  have  confidence  that  a  young 
devourer  of  dime  novels,  for  example, 
may  be  led  on  an  ascending  plane 
through  Castlemon,  Optic,  Alger,  Mayne 
Reid,  Henty,  Verne,  Andersen,  De  Foe, 
Scott,  Homer,  Shakspere,  more  easily 
than  a  boy  or  girl  who  runs  away  from 
print  of  every  sort  can  be  won  into  any 
similar  path.  For  my  own  part,  I  fear  the 
theory  is  unsafe  for  working.  It  will  prob- 
ably prove  true  in  some  cases ;  I  am 
quite  sure  that  it  will  prove  dangerously 
false  in  many  others.  There  are  kinds 
of  habit  and  appetite  in  reading  which 
seem  to  be  as  deep-rooted  in  unhealthy 
states  of  mind  and  brain  as  the  appetite 
for  opium    or   alcohol.    They    grow    up 


MISSIONARIES  OF  THE  BOOK   109 

among  the  habitual  readers  of  such  news- 
papers as  I  have  been  speaking  of,  and 
equally  among  readers  of  the  slop-shop 
novels,  vulgar  or  vile,  with  which  the 
world  is  flooded  in  this  age  of  print.  The 
newspaper  appetite  or  the  trash-novel 
appetite,  once  fastened  on  the  brain  of 
its  victim,  is  not  often  unloosed.  It 
masters  all  other  inclinations,  permits  no 
other  taste  or  interest  to  be  wakened. 
The  stuff  which  produces  it  is  as  danger- 
ous to  tamper  with  as  any  other  dream- 
and  stupor-making  narcotic.  To  bait 
readers  with  it,  expecting  to  lure  them 
on  to  better  literature,  is  to  run  a  grave 
risk  of  missing  the  end  and  realizing 
only  the  mischiefs  of  the  temptation. 

Far  safer  will  it  be  to  hold  the  public 
library  as  strictly  as  can  be  done  to  the 
mission  of  good  books.  And  that  is  a 
vague  prescription.  How  are  "  good 
books"  to  be  defined?  —  since  their 
goodness  is  of  many  degrees.  The  mere 
distinction  between  good  and  bad  in  lit- 


no    THE   MISSION   AND   THE 

erature  I  believe  to  be  recognized  easily, 
as  I  have  said,  by  every  person  who  has 
tasted  the  good  and  whose  intellectual 
sense  has  been  cultivated  by  it  to  even  a 
small  extent.  But  between  the  supremely 
good  and  that  which  is  simply  not  bad, 
there  are  degrees  beyond  counting.  From 
Sardou  to  Shakspere,  from  Trumbull  to 
Homer,  from  Roe  to  Thackeray,  from 
Tupper  to  Marcus  Aurelius,  from  Tal- 
mage  to  Thomas  a  Kempis  or  Thomas 
Fuller,  from  Jacob  Abbott  to  Edward 
Gibbon,  the  graduation  of  quality  is 
beyond  exact  marking  by  any  critical 
science.  How  shall  we  draw  lines  to  dis- 
tinguish the  negatively  from  the  posi- 
tively good  in  letters  ?  We  simply  can- 
not. We  can  only  lay  down  loose  lines 
and  put  behind  them  the  never  relaxing 
spring  of  one  elastic  and  always  prac- 
ticable rule :  Strive  unceasingly  for  the 
best.  Give  all  the  opportunities  to  the 
best  literature  of  every  class.  Give  front 
places  on  all  possible  occasions  to  the 


MISSIONARIES  OF  THE  BOOK   iii 

great  writers,  the  wise  writers,  the  learned 
writers,  the  wholesome  writers ;  keep 
them  always  in  evidence  ;  contrive  in- 
troductions for  them ;  make  readers  fa- 
miliar with  their  standing  and  rank. 
There  is  little  else  to  be  done.  The  pub- 
lic library  would  be  false  to  its  mission 
if  it  did  not  exclude  books  that  are  posi- 
tively bad,  either  through  vice  or  vul- 
garity ;  but  much  beyond  that  it  cannot 
easily  go.  Happily,  it  cannot  force  the 
best  literature  upon  its  public ;  for  if  it 
could,  the  effect  would  be  lost.  But  it 
can  recommend  the  best,  with  an  insist- 
ing urgency  that  will  prevail  in  the 
end. 

I  am  by  nature  an  optimist.  Things  as 
they  are  in  the  world  look  extremely 
disheartening  to  me,  but  I  think  I  can 
see  forces  at  work  which  will  powerfully 
change  them  before  many  generations 
have  passed.  Among  such  forces,  the 
most  potent  in  my  expectation  is  that 
which  acts  from  the  free  public  library. 


112     THE   MISSION   AND   THE 

Through  its  agency,  in  my  belief,  there 
will  come  a  day  —  it  may  be  a  distant 
day,  but  it  will  come  —  when  the  large 
knowledge,  the  wise  thinking,  the  fine 
feeling,  the  amplitude  of  spirit  that  are  in 
the  greater  literatures,  will  have  passed 
into  so  many  minds  that  they  will  rule 
society  democratically,  by  right  of  num- 
bers. I  see  no  encouragement  to  hope 
that  the  culture  which  lifts  men  from  gen- 
eration to  generation,  little  by  little,  to 
higher  levels  and  larger  visions  of  things, 
will  ever  be  made  universal.  Under  the 
best  circumstances  which  men  can  bring 
about,  nature  seems  likely  to  deny  to  a 
considerable  class  of  unfortunates  the 
capacity,  either  mentally,  or  morally,  or 
both,  for  refinement  and  elevation.  But 
if  that  be  true  at  all,  it  cannot  be  true  of 
any  formidable  number.  Among  the  pro- 
gressive races,  the  majority  of  men  and 
women  are  unquestionably  of  the  stuf? 
and  temper  out  of  which  anything  fine 
in  soul  and  strong  in  intellect  can  be 


MISSIONARIES  OF  THE  BOOK   113 

made,  if  not  in  one  generation,  then  in 
two,  or  three,  or  ten,  by  the  continual 
play  upon  them  of  influences  from  the 
finer  souls  and  greater  minds  of  their  own 
times  and  of  the  past.  It  is  not  by  nature 
but  by  circumstance,  heredity  itself  being 
an  offspring  of  circumstance,  that  light  is 
shut  from  the  greater  part  of  those  who 
walk  the  earth  with  darkened  minds. 
Man  is  so  far  the  master  of  circumstance 
that  he  can  turn  and  diffuse  the  light 
almost  as  he  will,  and  his  will  to  make 
the  illumination  of  the  few  common  to  the 
many  is  now  beyond  dispute.  All  the 
movements  that  I  have  reviewed  are 
marks  of  its  progressive  working.  It 
translates  into  active  energy  that  desire 
for  others  of  the  good  most  precious  to 
one's  self,  which  is  the  finest  and  noblest 
feeling  possible  to  human  nature.  All 
the  forces  of  selfishness  that  race  men 
against  one  another,  from  goal  to  goal 
of  a  simply  scientific  civilization,  would 
fail  to  bring  about  this  supreme  end  of 


114    MISSION   OF  THE   BOOK 

a  common  culture  for  the  race.  Nothing 
but  the  missionary  inspiration  could 
give  a  reasonable  promise  of  it.  Let 
us  thank  God  for  the  souls  He  has  put 
into  men,  having  that  capability  of  help- 
fulness to  one  another. 


V 

GOOD  AND  EVIL  FROM  THE 
PRINTING   PRESS 


GOOD  AND  EVIL  FROM  THE 
PRINTING  PRESS' 

From  the  first  movement  of  its  lever,  the 
Press  brought  an  immeasurable  new 
force  into  modern  civilization.  Its  earli- 
est service  was  rendered  mainly  to  schol- 
arship, in  the  diffusion  of  the  classic  writ- 
ings of  antiquity,  but  very  quickly  it  was 
drawn  into  a  more  popular  arena,  and 
gave  a  voice  to  the  appeals  of  religion, 
a  weapon  to  theological  dispute.  The 
rapidity  of  its  work  at  that  early  period 
is  shown  by  the  rapidity  of  the  spread  of 
the  ideas  of  the  Reformation,  for  which 
it  was  a  vehicle  that  could  not  have  been 
spared.  Between  Gutenberg's  death  and 
Luther's   birth   there   were   only  fifteen 

>  From  an  address  at  the  meeting  of  the  Ameri- 
can Library  Association,  1896. 


ii8     GOOD   AND   EVIL  FROM 

years  ;  but  the  reformer  found  already  an 
extensive  public  prepared  to  be  reached 
and  acted  on  by  the  printed  tract  and 
book.  That  the  intellectual  horizons  of 
life  were  widened  from  that  day  is  one  of 
the  plainest  historical  facts.  Its  skies, 
too,  were  lifted  to  a  loftier  arch,  and  it 
was  made  larger  in  all  ways,  by  energies 
which  the  new  instrument  of  knowledge 
set  free.  For  then,  and  long  afterward, 
there  was  earnestness  in  the  splendid 
work  of  type  and  press.  Some  kind  of 
purpose  —  not  always  good,  or  wise,  or 
true,  or  wholesome,  but  something  that 
had  thought  behind  it,  or  fact,  or  im- 
agination, or  emotion,  —  was  in  most 
things  that  received  the  printer's  stamp. 
Through  the  sixteenth,  seventeenth,  and 
eighteenth  centuries  there  are  not  many 
shallows  in  the  stream  of  print. 

At  the  opening  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury the  book  and  the  tract  remained  still 
thf'  principal  products  of  the  Press,  and 
the  custody  or  conveyance  of  ideas  was 


THE  PRINTING  PRESS     119 

still  its  chief  employ.  It  had  engaged 
itself  already  in  a  lighter  service,  as  the 
messenger  of  news  ;  but  that  was  a  mere 
apprenticeship,  not  yet  promising  of 
much  effect.  So  long  as  the  gathering 
of  news  depended  on  the  vehicles  of  the 
olden  time,  it  was  too  slow  and  too 
limited  a  work  to  stir  the  world.  But 
when  the  energy  of  steam  and  the  speed 
of  lightning  were  offered  to  the  News- 
paper Press,  that  passed  suddenly  to  the 
front  of  all  the  influences  acting  on  man- 
kind. School,  pulpit,  and  platform  were 
left  behind  it.  The  mastery  of  our  later 
civilization,  in  the  moral  moulding  of  it, 
if  not  more,  was  soon  seen  to  have  been 
grasped  by  adventurers  in  a  new  com- 
merce, which  made  merchandise  of  pass- 
ing history  and  marketed  the  tidings  of 
the  day. 

Meantime,  the  common  school  had 
been  doing  its  work  far  and  wide,  and 
most  men  and  women  of  the  leading 
races  had  learned  to  read.   That  is  to  say, 


I20    GOOD   AND   EVIL   FROM 

they  had  learned  to  decipher  language 
put  into  print,  or  had  learned  reading  as 
a  simple  art ;  but  the  educational  use  — 
the  culture  use  —  of  the  art  was  some- 
thing which  no  majority  of  them  had  yet 
acquired.  To  make  readers  of  them 
practically  as  well  as  potentially,  another 
agency  was  wanted  beyond  that  of  the 
school,  and  the  newspaper  came  appar- 
ently to  supply  it.  Books  and  libraries 
of  books  were  not  equal  to  the  service 
required.  Perhaps  it  will  always  be  im- 
possible for  book  literature  of  any  kind 
to  push  its  way  or  to  be  pushed  into  the 
hands  of  the  people  with  the  penetrating 
energy  that  carries  newspapers  to  all 
homes.  At  all  events,  the  common  school, 
making  possible  readers,  and  the  news- 
paper inviting  them  to  read,  arrived 
together,  at  a  conjunction  which  might 
have  seemed  to  be  a  happy  miracle  for 
the  universalizing  of  culture  in  the 
Western  world.  The  opportunity  that 
came  then  into  the  hands  of  the  conductors 


THE   PRINTING  PRESS     121 

of  the  news  press,  with  the  new  powers 
that  had  been  given  them,  has  never  been 
paralleled  in  human  history.  They  might 
have  been  gardeners  of  Eden  and  planters 
of  a  new  paradise  on  the  earth ;  for  its 
civilization  was  put  into  their  hands  to 
be  made  what  they  would  have  it  to  be. 
If  it  could  have  been  possible  then  to  deal 
with  newspapers  as  other  educational 
agencies  are  dealt  with  ;  to  invest  them 
with  definite  moral  responsibilities  to  the 
public ;  to  take  away  from  them  their 
commercial  origin  and  their  mercenary 
motive  ;  to  inspire  them  with  disinterested 
aims  ;  to  endow  them  as  colleges  are 
endowed  ;  to  man  them  for  their  work  as 
colleges  are  manned,  with  learning  and 
tried  capacity  in  the  editorial  chairs  ;  — ■ 
if  that  could  have  been  possible,  what  im- 
aginable degree  of  common  culture  might 
not  Europe  and  America  be  approaching 
to-day  ?  As  it  is,  we  are  trying  to  explain 
to  ourselves  a  condition  of  society  which 
alarms  and  shames  all  who  think  of  it. 


122     GOOD   AND   EVIL   FROM 

Nevertheless,  during  the  first  few  dec- 
ades of  the  modern  news  market,  —  as 
it  took  shape,  we  will  say,  early  in  the 
eighteen-forties,  —  the  influence  of  the 
newspapers  was  generally  more  whole- 
some than  otherwise.  Readers  of  them 
were  made  acquainted  with  things  worth 
the  knowing.  The  world  and  their  life 
in  it,  as  parts  of  a  great  whole,  were 
widened  to  them  wholesomely  and  genu- 
inely, and  by  much  more  than  the  larger 
knowledge  of  it  which  they  gathered 
from  day  to  day.  The  widening  of  the 
sympathetic  life  of  mankind,  meaning 
thereby  an  increment  and  expansion  of 
all  the  feelings  which  press  men  into 
closer  and  warmer  relations,  and  prepare 
them  for  truer  understandings  of  each 
other,  was  the  supreme  effect  upon  them 
of  the  daily  world-history  that  began  to 
be  reported  to  them  in  the  period  named. 

But  a  time  came  when  one  arose 
among  the  brokers  of  the  news  market 
who   made   a   discovery   which  proved 


THE  PRINTING  PRESS     123 

nearly  fatal  to  the  character  and  dignity 
o£  journalism.  He  discerned,  that  is,  with 
low  shrewdness,  an  unbounded  possi- 
bility of  degradation  in  human  curiosity 
and  vanity,  as  opening  a  great,  vulgar, 
and  profitable  field  for  unscrupulous  ex- 
ploitations of  the  newspaper  press.  He 
was  not  long  alone  in  the  enjoyment  of 
his  ignoble  discovery.  One  by  one,  the 
traffickers  in  news  yielded  to  the  cor- 
rupting example,  or  were  driven  by  less 
scrupulous  competitors  into  the  ranks  of 
the  new  journalism  ;  till,  to-day,  we  can 
count  on  the  fingers  of  not  many  hands 
the  important  newspapers  (in  America, 
at  least)  that  will  give  us  real  and 
clean  news,  and  not  force  us  to  strain 
some  meagre  pickings  of  it  out  of  a 
sickening  mixture  of  trivialities,  mor- 
bidities, vulgarities,  impertinences,  and 
worse. 

Here  and  there  we  may  still  bow  with 
respect  before  a  newspaper  over  which 
the  responsible  editor  has  kept  his  sov- 


124    GOOD   AND   EVIL   FROM 

ereignty.  In  most  instances  he  has  been 
deposed,  and  the  irresponsible  reporter 
reigns  in  his  place,  —  master  of  the  awful 
power  of  the  Press,  —  chief  educator  of 
his  generation,  —  pervading  genius  of 
the  civilization  of  his  time.  Trained  to 
look  at  all  things,  in  heaven  above  or 
in  the  earth  beneath,  with  an  eye  single 
to  the  glory  of  big  type,  he  sees  them 
in  one  aspect.  The  great  and  the  little, 
the  good  and  the  bad,  the  sweet  and  the 
foul,  the  momentous  and  the  trivial, 
the  tragic  and  the  comic,  the  public  and 
the  sacredly  private,  are  of  one  stuff  in 
his  eyes,  —  mere  colorings  of  a  fabric  of 
life  which  Time  weaves  for  him  to  slit 
and  to  slash  with  his  merciless,  indiffer- 
ent shears.  And  so,  with  little  prejudice 
and  small  partiality  between  things  high 
and  low,  he  makes  the  daily  literature  on 
which  most  of  us  feed  and  tincture  our 
minds.  It  is  a  monotoned  literature,  and 
its  one  note  is  flippancy :  the  flippant 
headline,  the  fli]:)pant  paragraph,  the  flip- 


THE  PRINTING  PRESS     125 

pant  narrative,  the  flippant  comment.  To 
jest  at  calamity,  to  be  jocular  with  crime, 
to  sting  personal  misfortune  with  a  smart 
impertinence  or  cap  it  with  a  slang 
phrase ;  to  be  respectful  and  serious  to- 
ward nothing  else  so  much  as  toward  the 
gayeties  of  the  world  of  fashion  and  the 
gaming  of  the  world  of  sport,  appear  to 
be  the  perfections  of  the  art  to  which  he 
is  trained. 

And  no  careful  observer  can  fail  to  see 
that  the  degradation  of  the  newspaper 
press  is  degrading  most  of  the  voices  of 
the  time.  The  shallow  flippancy  which 
began  in  journalism  is  affecting  litera- 
ture in  every  popular  form.  More  and 
more  the  air  is  filled  with  thin  strains 
of  wordy  song ;  but  the  deep-toned  mel- 
odies of  thoughtful  poetry  are  dying 
out  of  it  fast.  Rhymers  multiply  apace, 
and  the  reporter  inspires  them.  They 
worship  the  god  Novelty  with  him,  and 
Apollo  is  forgotten.  They  exercise  a 
nimble  fancy  on  tight-ropes  and  trapezes 


126     GOOD   AND   EVIL   FROM 

of  metrical  invention,  in  performances 
that  are  curious  to  behold. 

The  art- world,  too,  is  infected  with  the 
irresponsible  levity  which  had  its  genesis 
in  the  newspaper.  Half  of  the  men  and 
women  who  paint  pictures  are  doing  so 
with  scornful  denials  of  any  thoughtful 
purpose  in  their  work.  "Art  for  Art's 
sake  "  is  the  senseless  formula  of  their 
contempt  for  the  reverent  service  of  im- 
agination and  reason  which  Art  could 
command  from  them  if  Art  knew  them 
at  all. 

On  all  the  commoner  sides  of  its  life 
there  is  singularly  and  lamentably  a 
shallowness,  a  flippancy,  a  vulgarity,  in 
the  present  age.  Who  can  dispute  the 
fact  ?  And  what  is  plainer  than  the  causes 
we  can  find,  in  that  precipitate,  enormous 
expansion  and  acceleration  of  communi- 
cation in  the  world  which  has  occurred 
within  our  time,  acting  on  civilized  so- 
ciety, and  most  powerfully  in  America, 
in  three  modes,  namely :  (i)  an  increas- 


THE   PRINTING   PRESS      127 

ing  excitement  of  commerce,  following 
closely  upon  the  loss  from  it  of  all  its 
older  incidents  of  discovery  and  adven- 
ture, producing,  for  the  time,  a  vulgariz- 
ing mercenary  nakedness  ;  (2)  an  abrupt 
plunge  for  the  freer  peoples  from  theo- 
retical into  practical  democracy,  conse- 
quent on  the  sudden  creation  of  tremen- 
dous new  agencies  of  combination  and 
organization,  and  the  generating  of  a 
public  opinion  that  is  a  new  and  untrained 
force  in  the  world ;  (3)  the  evolution  of 
the  modern  newspaper  and  its  speed}^^ 
corruption,  from  the  mighty  servant  of 
civilization  that  it  ought  to  be  into  the 
busy  pander  of  every  vulgarity  that  the 
new  conditions  can  feed. 

But  this  is  not  the  end  of  the  story. 
These  are  but  early  effects,  —  effects  in 
their  beginning,  from  great  enduring 
causes,  the  operation  of  which  they  can- 
not exhaust.  If  the  common  mind  of  the 
age  is  trivialized  and  vulgarized  by  its 
newspapers  and  its  commerce,  it  is  being 


128     GOOD   AND   EVIL   FROM 

pricked,  at  the  same  time,  to  a  new 
alertness,  even  by  the  worst  journalism 
and  the  fiercest  money-making,  and 
faculties  are  being  wakened  in  it  that  will 
some  day  answer  the  call  to  higher  uses. 
The  influences  which  will  bear  on  it  to 
that  result  are  gathering  volume  and 
weight.  For  powerful  forces  are  working 
even  now  in  the  world  to  broaden  life 
for  those  who  will  have  it  so,  not  super- 
ficially, but  profoundly,  and  not  in  mere 
sense  and  circumstance,  but  in  conscious- 
ness and  power. 

There  are  some  ideas  which,  when 
they  have  got  a  setting  in  the  mind,  are 
like  magnifying  lenses  to  the  eye  of 
reason,  clearing  and  enlarging  its  whole 
vision  of  things.  The  Copernican  idea  of 
the  structure  of  the  universe  was  such  an 
one.  By  dispelling  the  human  egotism  of 
the  view  which  put  man  and  his  habita- 
tion at  the  centre  of  creation,  it  opened 
new  vistas  to  thinking  in  a  hundred 
directions.     The     idea    which     Newton 


THE   PRINTING  PRESS     129 

brought  to  light,  of  a  unity  of  law  in 
the  universe,  was  another.  The  completer 
development  of  that  idea  in  the  doctrine 
of  the  correlation  of  forces,  or  the  present 
notion  of  energy,  is  another.  But  of  all 
the  emancipating  conceptions  which,  one 
by  one,  have  entered  and  possessed  the 
mind  of  man,  there  was  never  one  before 
that  brought  such  liberations  with  it  as 
came  in  Darwin's  message  to  our  own 
time.  It  is  hardly  too  much  to  say  that 
the  full,  free  exercise  of  human  reason 
on  all  the  greater  problems  of  life  and 
destiny,  whether  personal  or  social,  really 
began  with  the  perception  and  apprehen- 
sion of  evolutionary  processes  in  God's 
work.  That  has  raised  the  thinking 
minds  of  our  day  to  a  summit  of  obser- 
vation which  was  never  attainable  before, 
while  eager  science  brings  daily  new  helps 
to  them  for  the  expansion  of  their  view. 
It  is  true  that  this  intellectual  expan- 
sion of  life  is  known  nowhere  to  all  men. 
Even  so  much  of  it  as  goes  with  vague 


I30    GOOD   AND   EVIL   FROM 

glimpses  of  the  working  of  universal  law 
is  still  no  common  experience ;  while 
those  who  know  it  in  its  fullness  are  every- 
where a  few.  But  something  from  it  is 
diffusing  itself  in  the  whole  atmosphere 
of  the  age ;  something  penetrating, 
stimulating,  virile ;  something  which 
most  men  are  compelled  to  feel  whether 
they  comprehend  it  or  not,  and  to  which 
the  finer  elements  in  them  must  respond 
by  some  sort  of  rally  and  growth.  Of 
hopeful  phenomena  in  the  world,  that  one 
is  the  greatest  of  all.  It  indexes  a  new 
state  of  the  common  mind,  now  cleared 
for  the  most  part  of  old  superstitions,  and 
thus  prepared  for  the  receiving  of  light 
to  dispel  its  old  ignorances. 

And  what  a  wakening  of  moral  no  less 
than  intellectual  energies  there  is  in  our 
time,  for  work  directed  to  that  end  !  A 
little  while  ago  the  steam  engine,  the 
factory,  the  forge,  the  mine,  the  mart, 
represented  about  all  the  human  energy 
that  made  itself  conspicuous  in  the  civil- 


THE  PRINTING  PRESS     131 

ized  world,  excepting  some  occasional 
explosions  of  it  in  movements  of  religious 
and  political  enthusiasm  and  in  raging 
outbursts  of  war.  To-day  it  is  not  so. 
No  little  part  of  the  interest,  the  ardor, 
the  force,  the  ingenuity  which  spent 
themselves  on  those  objects  before  are 
going  over  into  a  very  different  field. 
We  are  seeing  the  rise  of  an  enterprise 
in  education  which  almost  rivals  the  en- 
terprise of  mechanic  industry  and  trade. 
Invention  is  half  as  busy  in  the  improv- 
ing of  schools,  in  the  perfecting  of  in- 
struction, in  the  circulating  of  books,  in 
the  stimulating  of  reading  and  study,  as 
it  used  to  be  busy  in  the  making  of 
machines.  The  diffusion  of  literature  is 
left  no  longer  to  depend,  like  the  diffusion 
of  cotton  fabrics  or  tea,  on  the  mercenary 
agencies  of  trade.  Half  a  century  ago 
the  free  public  library  was  created.  For 
thirty  years  past  it  has  been  worked  over 
by  one  set  of  people,  just  as  the  steam 
engine  has  been  worked  over  by  another 


132     GOOD   AND   EVIL  FROM 

set,  and  the  electric  dynamo  by  a  third. 
Its  powers  have  been  learned,  its  effi- 
ciency developed,  in  the  same  scientific 
way.  Cunning  variations  of  form  are 
being  wrought  in  it,  to  fit  all  circum- 
stances and  to  do  its  civilizing  work  in 
all  places.  It  becomes  a  Traveling  Li- 
brary to  make  its  way  into  villages  and 
rural  corners  of  the  land.  It  becomes 
a  Home  Library  to  reach  the  tenement- 
houses  and  purlieus  of  the  city.  It 
spreads  itself  in  branches  and  delivery 
stations.  It  distributes  choice  reading 
in  the  schools,  to  broaden  the  teacher's 
work.  It  drums  and  advertises  its  un- 
priced wares  like  a  shop-keeper,  avari- 
cious of  gain.  It  is  taking  up  the  eager, 
laborious,  strenuous  spirit  of  the  present 
age,  and  wresting  some  large  part  of  it 
away  from  the  sordid  activities  of  life,  to 
give  it  unmercenary  aims. 

So  books  are  being  made  to  do  con- 
siderably alone  what  books  and  newspa- 
pers ought  rightly  to  be  doing  together. 


THE   PRINTING   PRESS      133 

As  a  carrier  in  the  spiritual  commerce  of 
the  world,  the  book  is  not  nearly  so  agile, 
so  lightly  winged,  so  Mercury-like  as  the 
newspaper  can  be ;  but  when  each  is  at 
the  best,  how  much  nobler  is  the  freight- 
age of  books ! 

I  rest  my  faith  in  a  future  of  finer 
culture  for  mankind  on  the  energy  of 
free  public  libraries  in  distributing  good 
books,  far  more  than  on  any  other  agency 
that  is  working  in  the  world.  So  far  they 
have  but  opened  gates  into  the  field  of 
influence  that  is  before  them ;  but  the 
gates  are  really  swung  wide,  and  the 
length  and  breadth  of  the  field  is  fully 
seen,  and  the  spirit  that  will  possess  it 
and  work  in  it  is  eagerly  alive.  I  speak 
soberly  when  I  say  that  the  greatest  an- 
tagonism to  be  met  and  overcome  is  that 
of  the  vulgarized  part  of  the  newspaper 
press.  I  say  this  with  persisting  iteration, 
because  I  am  convinced  that  it  is  the  fact 
which  needs  most  at  the  present  day  to 
be  understood.    How  to  win  readers  of 


134     THE   PRINTING   PRESS 

the  general  mass  from  unwholesome 
newspapers  to  wholesome  books,  or  how 
to  change  the  spirit  of  the  common  news- 
papers of  the  day  from  flippancy  to  so- 
briety, —  from  the  tone  of  the  worst  in 
social  manners  and  morals  to  the  tone  of 
the  best,  —  is  one  of  the  gravest  pending 
problems  of  civilization,  if  not  the  gravest 
of  all.  The  zeal  and  energy  of  free  schools 
and  free  libraries  can  achieve  the  solu- 
tion of  it,  and  I  see  nothing  else  that  can. 


VI 

PUBLIC   LIBRARIES   AND 
PUBLIC   EDUCATION 


PUBLIC    LIBRARIES    AND 
PUBLIC   EDUCATION' 

The  function  of  our  free  circulating  libra- 
ries is  diffusion,  which  is  a  function  of 
active  responsibility.  The  prime  purpose 
of  their  institution  is  to  bring  to  bear 
upon  the  greatest  possible  number  of 
people  the  profitable  influences  that  are 
found  in  books.  That  object  restricts 
them  to  no  narrow  range.  It  takes  in 
whatever  can  be  tributary  to  all  that  has 
excellence  and  value  in  men.  It  embraces 
the  wholesome  literature  of  imagination 
and  emotion,  no  less  than  the  literature  of 
knowledge  and  thought.  The  graces  and 
harmonies  of  education,  and  the  sweet- 
enings and  colorings  of  life,  are  compre- 

1  From  a  paper  read  before  the  American  Social 
Science  Association,  in  1883. 


138     PUBLIC   LIBRARIES   AND 

hended  equally  with  the  ethics  and  the 
practical  powers.  There  is  no  narrow- 
ness in  the  range,  as  I  have  said ;  but  it 
has  a  well-marked  bound.  It  is  bounded 
by  all  the  lines  in  literature  which  sepa- 
rate purity  from  grossness,  art  from  rub- 
bish, good  from  bad.  It  is  so  bounded  by 
its  purpose,  which  I  think  I  have  stated 
with  precision  when  I  say  that  the  sole 
reason  for  the  existence  of  a  popular 
library  is  the  endeavor  made  through  it 
to  bring  to  bear  on  the  greatest  possible 
number  of  people  the  profitable  influ- 
ences that  are  in  books ;  and  it  has  no 
excuse  for  being  if  it  cannot  discriminate 
with  some  success  between  the  profitable 
and  the  unprofitable  quality  of  books. 

Of  course  this  involves  a  selective  crit- 
icism, or  a  censorship  of  books,  if  one 
chooses  to  call  it  so,  in  the  government 
of  popular  libraries ;  but  what  then  ?  Is 
not  the  same  kind  of  selective  criticism, 
—  the  same  kind  of  discriminative  judg- 
ment, —  the  same  censorial  assumption. 


PUBLIC   EDUCATION       139 

—  involved  in  all  public  services,  from 
legislation  down  ?  To  what  public  insti- 
tution will  it  be  denied  ?  If  a  gallery  of 
art  is  founded,  for  the  finer  teaching  of 
the  eyes  of  the  people,  and  for  kindling 
the  light  of  the  love  of  beauty  in  their 
souls,  does  any  one  claim  a  place  in  it 
for  the  pictorial  advertisements  of  the  cir- 
cus, or  for  the  popular  sculpture  of  the 
cemeteries,  on  the  ground  that  there  is 
a  public  which  finds  pleasure  in  them  ? 
Yet  something  comparable  with  that  de- 
mand is  found  in  the  frequent  expecta- 
tion that  public  libraries  shall  descend  to 
levels  of  taste  in  literature  which  all  cul- 
tivated taste  condemns.  It  is  assumed 
quite  naturally  that  somewhere  in  the 
control  of  a  public  art-collection  there 
shall  be  an  instructed  criticism  at  work, 
to  distinguish,  with  what  care  and  capa- 
bility it  can,  the  true  productions  of  art 
from  its  counterfeits,  and  to  set  up  cer- 
tain standards  of  taste  which  it  is  desir- 
able to  have  urged  upon  the  public  for 


I40    I^UBLIC   LIBRARIES  AND 

common  recognition.  Wherein  are  the 
considerations  which  bear  on  the  popu- 
larizing of  literature  and  the  teaching  of 
books,  by  means  of  public  libraries,  dif- 
ferent from  those  that  bear  on  the  popu- 
larizing of  art  by  public  museums  of 
painting,  sculpture,  and  design  ?  If  they 
differ  at  all  it  is  by  reason  of  the  greater 
power  and  greater  importance  of  the 
educating  influence  in  books. 

I  am  not  thinking  altogether  of  ques- 
tions touching  fiction  in  public  libraries, 
which  have  been  much  discussed  ;  though 
that,  in  the  treatment  of  this  subject, 
takes,  of  course,  the  foremost  place.  It 
is  a  question  much  discussed,  but  not 
always  on  broad  grounds.  Here  is  a  form 
of  literature  that  we  have  seen,  almost  in 
our  own  generation,  rise  from  a  modest 
rank  in  the  realm  of  letters  to  undisputed 
ascendency.  It  has  introduced  a  new 
Muse  to  our  Olympus  and  has  throned 
her  royally  in  the  highest  seat,  where  the 
crown  and  the  sceptre,  the  honors  and 


PUBLIC   EDUCATION       141 

the  powers  of  the  pen,  are  alike  given  up 
to  her.  For  my  part,  I  am  submissive  to 
the  revolution  that  has  brought  us  under 
this  new  reign  in  literature ;  I  have  no 
discontent  with  it.  I  recognize  the  mod- 
ern Romance,  or  Novel,  as  the  true  heir 
and  natural  successor  of  the  Epic  and 
the  Drama,  which  held  anciently,  in  their 
turn,  the  regal  place  in  literature.  I  look 
upon  it  as  representing  no  mere  literary 
fashion  of  the  day,  but  distinctly  a  de- 
velopment in  literary  art  —  the  plastic 
shaping  by  organic  growth  of  a  new, ' 
perfected  form  of  epic  and  dramatic  ex- 
pression moulded  in  one  ;  fitting  itself  to 
new  conditions  of  general  culture,  with 
more  versatile  capabilities  and  powers. 
It  is  not  alone  approved  by  the  suffrages 
of  the  multitude,  it  is  preferred  by  the 
bards  and  "  makers  "  themselves.  More 
and  more  we  can  see  that  the  dramatic 
genius  of  the  age  turns  lovingly  to  this 
new  form  of  art  and  expends  itself  upon 
it.    If   Shakspere  were   living   in   these 


142     PUBLIC   LIBRARIES  AND 

days,  I  doubt  not  we  should  have  more 
novels  than  plays  from  his  pen. 

At  all  events  the  chief  power  in  litera- 
ture for  our  generation  belongs  to  the 
novel,  and  if  we  will  recognize  and  deal 
with  it  broadly  in  that  view  there  is 
nothing  lamentable  in  the  fact.  Let  us 
freely  concede  to  it  the  great  domain  it 
has  won  for  itself  on  the  art-side  of  litera- 
ture, and  pay  to  it  the  respect  we  give 
to  all  art  —  no  less,  no  more.  We  can 
hardly  claim  to  have  done  that  yet. 
There  is  something  half  disdainful,  half 
shamed  and  apologetic,  in  the  very  hom- 
age conceded  to  this  new-comer  among 
the  Muses.  Her  devotees  do  not  seem  to 
be  quite  assured  of  her  Olympian  repu- 
tability,  and  find,  perhaps,  a  little  pleas- 
ure in  the  suspicion  that  she  and  Folly  are 
near  kin.  So  we  all  continue  to  speak  of 
the  realm  of  "light  literature  ;  "  as  though 
the  literature  that  is  weighted  with  the 
fruits  of  the  genius  of  George  Eliot, 
Thackeray,  Dickens,  Balzac,  Hawthorne, 


PUBLIC   EDUCATION       143 

Scott,  De  Foe,  can  justly  be  called  "  light." 
The  lightness  which  it  has  is  the  lightness 
of  the  spirit  of  art  —  the  lightness  which 
art  takes  from  the  up-bearing  wings  on 
which  it  is  exalted,  and  whereby  it  has 
the  power  to  transport  us  high  and  far, 
and  make  us  travelers  beyond  the  swim- 
ming of  ships  or  the  rolling  of  wheels. 

Whatever  it  may  be  that  acts  on  men 
with  that  kind  of  power  is  a  factor  in 
education  as  important  as  science  or  his- 
tory. It  is  like  the  wine  and  sweetness 
of  the  fruits  which  are  the  wholesome 
peptic  trifles  of  our  bodily  food,  and 
it  contributes  quite  as  much  as  the 
strong  meats  of  learning  to  a  vigorous 
and  symmetrical  growth  of  human  char- 
acter. In  the  novel,  these  potencies  of 
art  are  universalized  more  than  in  any 
preceding  form  ;  it  brings  a  larger  mass 
of  mankind  within  their  range,  to  be 
quickened  in  spirit  by  them  and  to  be 
wrought  upon  by  an  inward  leaven  which 
human  beings  are  sodden  without.    As 


144     PUBLIC   LIBRARIES   AND 

a  true  product  of  art  in  literature,  the  novel 
seems  to  me  to  be  a  great  instrument  of 
education,  in  the  large  sense  of  the  word 
—  not  for  all  men  and  women,  perhaps, 
but  for  most,  and  especially  for  those 
whose  lives  are  narrow  and  constrained. 
There  are  not  many  of  us  who  do  not 
owe  to  it  some  reaches  and  happy  vistas 
of  the  intellectual  landscape  in  which  we 
live,  and  the  compass  of  our  thoughts, 
feelings,  sympathies,  tolerances,  would 
shrink  sadly  if  they  were  taken  away. 
It  is  only  a  little  region  of  actual  things 
that  we  can  include  in  our  personal  hori- 
zons—  a  few  individual  people,  a  few 
communities,  a  few  groups  and  growths 
of  society,  a  few  places,  a  few  situations 
and  arrangements  of  circumstance,  a  few 
movements  of  events,  that  we  can  know 
and  be  familiar  with  by  any  intimacy  and 
experience  of  our  own.  But  how  easily 
our  neighborhoods  and  acquaintances 
are  multiplied  for  us  by  the  hospitable 
genius   of   the  novelist !   To  be  put  in 


PUBLIC   EDUCATION       145 

companionship  with  Caleb  Garth  and 
Adam  Bede,  with  Colonel  Newcome  and 
Henry  Esmond  ;  to  meet  Mrs.  Poyser 
and  Mr.  Weller  ;  to  visit  in  Barsetshire 
with  Mr.  Trollope  and  loiter  through 
Alsace  with  the  Messrs.  Erckmann  and 
Chatrian  ;  to  look  on  Saxon  England 
with  the  imagination  of  Kingsley,  on 
Eighteenth-century  England  with  the 
sympathetic  understanding  of  Thack- 
eray, on  Puritan  Massachusetts  with  the 
clairvoyance  of  Hawthorne  —  how  large 
and  many-sided  a  life  must  be  to  em- 
brace in  its  actualities  so  much  of  a  ripen- 
ing education  as  this ! 

But,  if  there  is  no  other  form  in  which 
the  broadening  influences  of  art  can  be 
exercised  more  powerfully  than  in  the 
novel,  there  is  no  other  form  that  lends 
itself  to  base  counterfeiting  so  easily. 
And  the  vulgar  product  is  vulgar  beyond 
comparison  with  any  other.  More  than 
vulgar ;  for  the  travesty  of  life  which 
these  romances  of  book-smithing  exhibit 


146    PUBLIC   LIBRARIES   AND 

is  mischievous  in  its  whole  effect.  Every 
feeling  that  they  act  upon,  every  senti- 
ment that  they  stimulate,  every  idea  that 
they  produce,  is  infected  with  the  falsity 
that  is  in  them.  Neither  virtue  nor  piety 
in  the  intention  with  which  they  are  com- 
posed can  better  very  much  the  evil 
influence  they  exert ;  for  clean  as  they 
may  be  of  all  other  vice,  there  is  wick- 
edness in  their  misrepresentations  and 
depravity  in  their  untruth.  I  see  nothing 
for  my  own  part  but  malarial  unwhole- 
someness,  breeding  moral  distempers  and 
intellectual  debility,  in  the  trash  of  fiction 
with  which  the  world  is  being  flooded, 
whether  it  emanates  from  the  "  Satanic  " 
or  the  Sunday-School  press. 

No  agency  is  available  for  resisting  this 
flood  so  effectively  and  so  responsibly 
as  the  public  library.  I  do  not  know  that 
its  right  to  exercise  upon  literature  the 
criticism  which  discriminates  art  from 
rubbish  is  ever  disclaimed  formally,  but 
it  seems  often  to  stand  in  some  doubt 


PUBLIC   EDUCATION       147 

Perhaps  the  criticism  demanded  in  this 
case  is  not  distinguished  clearly  from  the 
presuming  and  very  different  censorship 
that  would  inspect  opinions,  and  under- 
take to  judge  for  the  public  between  true 
and  false  teaching  in  religion,  or  politics, 
or  social  economy ;  but  the  two  have  no 
principle  in  common.  They  differ  as  the 
insolence  of  sumptuary  laws  differs  from 
the  sound  reasonableness  of  laws  for  the 
suppression  of  counterfeits  and  adultera- 
tions. If  there  could  be  an  institution  for 
the  purveying  of  food,  or  drugs,  or  any 
kind  of  material  provision,  that  should 
stand  in  a  relation  to  the  public  like  that 
of  the  free  library,  we  would  certainly 
deny  its  right  to  a  jurisdiction  over  the 
demands  of  the  people  so  far  as  concerned 
the  kinds  and  varieties  of  commodities 
to  be  supplied  ;  but  just  as  certainly  we 
would  hold  it  responsible  for  the  quality 
of  the  things  it  had  been  instituted  to 
provide.  We  would  reasonably  require 
the  institution  to  be  so  organized  as  to 


148     PUBLIC   LIBRARIES  AND 

embrace  within  its  management  the 
capability  to  distinguish  competent  from 
incompetent  work,  and  genuine  from 
counterfeited  products.  That  is  precisely 
the  kind  of  discrimination  to  be  exercised 
in  public  libraries  in  the  matter  of  this 
romance  literature,  which  is  worth  so 
much  as  a  product  of  literary  art  and  is 
so  worthless  when  wanting  the  touches 
of  art.  The  question  concerning  it  is  al- 
most purely  a  question  of  quality.  Where 
a  subtler  question  arises,  —  a  debatable 
question  of  taste,  within  the  range  of 
uncertain  canons  in  which  questions  of 
taste  are  open,  —  I  would  not  ask  to 
have  it  arbitrated  in  a  public  library.  But 
the  great  mass  of  the  trash  of  fiction  is 
not  touched  by  such  questions.  The  dis- 
cernment of  its  worthlessness  depends  on 
nothing  but  some  familiar  acquaintance 
with  good  literature,  and  on  the  sense 
of  quality  which  that  acquaintance  will 
develop. 

If   public  libraries  do  no  more  than 


PUBLIC   EDUCATION       149 

administer  those  common  verdicts  of  the 
literary  world  that  are  of  authority  and 
weight,  they  will  sweep  a  mountain  of 
rubbish  from  their  shelves ;  they  will 
command  from  the  public  a  hearing  for 
criticism  that  will  never  be  secured  other- 
wise, and  they  will  be  exercising  in  a 
most  important  particular  the  educational 
responsibility  that  belongs  to  them.  The 
safe  rule  under  which  I  should  like  to 
see  them  placed  in  their  dealing  with 
romance  is  the  rule  of  conservatism  —  of 
slowness  —  of  waiting  for  the  judgments 
and  verdicts  by  which  literary  work  is 
proved.  They  are  not  speculators  in  the 
book  market ;  their  interest  in  literature 
is  not  a  commercial  one,  like  Mudie's ; 
they  are  instituted  for  a  missionary  pur- 
pose, and  their  business,  as  I  have  said, 
is  to  bring  to  bear  on  the  greatest 
number  of  people  the  profitable  influences 
that  are  in  books.  Why  should  they  be 
in  haste  to  catch  up  the  novelties  of  the 
romance  press,  like  merchants  eager  for 


I50    PUBLIC    LIBRARIES  AND 

custom  ?  Why  should  they  not  keep  all 
this  doubtful  literature  waiting  at  their 
doors  till  it  has  been  weighed  and  pro- 
nounced upon,  not  by  the  public  opinion 
of  Tom,  Dick  and  Harry,  and  the  school- 
girls, and  the  idle  and  raw-minded  body 
of  readers,  but  by  the  instructed  public 
opinion  which  is  the  court  of  last  resort 
for  all  books,  and  which  determines  the 
ultimate  fate  of  all  ? 

I  have  not  touched  the  question  of 
morals  as  affecting  this  literature,  because 
that  is  included  substantially  in  the  ques- 
tion of  literary  quality.  In  America  and 
England  (I  say  nothing  of  other  coun- 
tries) the  literary  taste  which  prevails  and 
has  authority  is  moral  enough,  because 
healthy  enough,  to  be  trusted  fairly  with 
the  whole  adjudication.  I  know  of  no 
vicious  or  unwholesome  novel,  poem, 
play,  or  other  imaginative  work  belong- 
ing to  contemporary  literature,  that  has 
standing  enough  in  the  English-speaking 
literary  world  to  commend  it  to  a  public 


PUBLIC   EDUCATION       151 

library,  if  nothing  is  considered  but  the 
view  of  it  from  literary  standpoints. 
Generally,  I  think,  among  the  Teutonic 
peoples,  the  conception  of  art  is  essen- 
tially a  moral  conception,  —  the  concep- 
tion of  a  fundamental  purity,  —  and  the 
more  highly  the  art-sense  of  these  peoples 
is  cultivated  the  more  clear-sighted  it  be- 
comes as  to  the  falsity  in  art  of  all  moral 
falsity.  And  so  I  should  feel  safe  in 
making  it  the  rule  for  public  libraries  of 
the  popular  class,  that  they  should  admit 
freely  whatever  wins  a  good  standing  in 
the  literary  public  opinion  of  the  time, 
and  admit  nothing  till  that  standing  is 
assured  to  it. 

There  is  a  large  body  of  older  litera- 
ture which  requires  some  different  rule. 
It  comes  to  us  from  coarse  or  corrupted 
periods  of  the  past,  when  the  ethics  of 
literary  art  were  slightly  perceived,  little 
felt.  In  some  of  it  there  are  all  the  ad- 
mirable qualities  that  imaginative  litera- 
ture produced  without  moral  sensitive- 


152     PUBLIC   LIBRARIES   AND 

ness  can  have.  It  is  vigorous,  brilliant, 
graceful.  It  gained  in  its  own  day  a  lit- 
erary standing  which  it  could  not  win  in 
ours ;  but  we  are  disposed,  and  perhaps 
rightly,  to  let  it  stand  at  the  original 
rating.  Historically,  as  representative 
literature,  it  has  great  importance  and 
interest  to  those  who  will  use  it  in  that 
character,  as  students  of  literature  and 
history  in  the  thorough-going  sense.  But 
I  can  see  no  good  purpose  it  can  serve 
in  popular  libraries,  and  no  reason  for  its 
having  a  place  in  them.  The  drama  of 
the  Restoration,  a  great  part  of  the  more 
famous  novels  of  tTie  eighteenth  century, 
with  much  of  the  older  romance,  are 
examples  of  what  I  mean.  On  what 
reasonable  ground  is  acquaintance  with 
them  popularized  at  the  present  day  ?  Of 
the  kindred  literature  from  other  lan- 
guages that  has  been  imported  into  the 
English  by  translation,  I  can  only  ask  the 
same  question  with  more  emphasis. 
I  leave  large  ranges  of  literature,  in 


PUBLIC   EDUCATION       153 

which  nothing  I  have  said  will  offer  a 
hint  of  the  bounds  I  am  asking  to  have 
set  for  our  popular  libraries  ;  and  I  am 
ready  to  confess  with  frankness  that  I  do 
not  know  where  to  set  the  bounds,  nor 
how.  Perhaps  it  is  not  a  practicable 
thing  to  do.  And  yet  I  am  sure  the  at- 
tempt should  be  made  to  mark  out,  in  all 
literature,  with  some  rough  consistency, 
the  provinces  of  the  popular  library, 
as  distinguished  from  the  library  of  re- 
search and  history,  or  the  museum  of 
books.  Not,  I  say  again,  to  set  narrow 
or  parsimonious  limitations  upon  them. 
It  is  no  petty  conception  of  the  popular 
library  that  I  have  formed.  For  popu- 
lar uses  I  want  it  as  great  as  it  can  be 
made.  Not  for  uses  of  common  reading 
only,  but  for  all  uses.  I  should  have 
looked  but  a  little  way  into  the  influence 
of  these  libraries  if  I  took  account  of  no 
more  than  the  set  "  reading "  that  they 
encourage  and  supply.  They  have  a 
greater  ofBce  than  that.    It  is  to  induce 


154    PUBLIC   LIBRARIES  AND 

a  habit  among  people  of  following  up 
the  chance  topics  and  questions  in  which 
their  interest  happens  from  time  to  time 
to  be  stirred  by  casual  circumstances  and 
hints.  A  school  exercise,  a  newspaper 
paragraph,  an  allusion  from  the  pulpit, 
a  picture,  a  quotation,  a  play,  will  often 
supply  an  impulse  that  carries  itself  long 
and  far  into  the  intellectual  life  and 
growth  of  our  library  students,  but  which, 
without  the  help  of  the  public  library, 
would  come  to  naught.  Making  it  com- 
mon and  habitual,  in  some  wide  circle 
of  people,  to  say  on  such  occasions,  "  I 
will  go  to  the  library  and  pursue  this  mat- 
ter," or  "  put  this  statement  to  the  proof," 
or  "learn  more  of  this  man"  or  "of 
these  writings,"  the  public  library  brings 
into  action  more  energies  of  education 
than  can  be  organized  in  any  college  or 
school.  And  so,  for  its  greatest  efficiency, 
it  needs  to  be  equipped  largely,  liberally, 
with  resources  for  every  kind  of  common 
investigation  ;  for  every  kind  of  investi- 


PUBLIC   EDUCATION       155 

gation,  I  mean,  that  is  not  elaborated  in 
professional  study,  or  special  scientific 
research,  or  minute  erudition.  For  such 
special  quests  and  profounder  pursuits  of 
learning  I  do  not  think  that  the  popular 
library  should  undertake  the  providing 
of  books.  All  the  resources  it  can  com- 
mand will  seldom  be  too  great  for  em- 
ployment in  its  own  great  office,  which 
is  to  popularize  the  profitable  influence 
of  books. 

Before  everything  else  it  should  have 
these  two  aims :  First,  to  be  abounding 
in  its  supply  of  good  literature,  within 
the  range  of  popular  use ;  second,  to  be 
perfect  in  arrangements  for  exhibiting  its 
stores  and  making  them  accessible,  and 
to  be  fertile  and  persistent  in  devices  for 
winning  students  and  for  helping  them 
with  all  encouraging  aids.  If  the  library 
is  stinted  anywhere,  let  it  not  be  in  the 
better  books  for  which  there  is  most  of 
a  popular  call.  Better  fifty  copies  of  one 
book  that  will  get  so  many  readers,  than 


156    PUBLIC   LIBRARIES  AND 

fifty  various  books  which  few  will  use.  I 
am  disposed  to  believe  that  a  popular 
library  should  expend  its  means  very 
grudgingly  upon  wider  acquisitions  until 
it  has  so  multiplied  on  its  shelves  the  few 
best  books  most  wanted  by  its  general 
readers  that  it  will  seldom  disappoint  a 
call  for  one  of  them.  I  put  that  forward 
as  the  first  claim  upon  its  funds  ;  and  next 
to  that  I  put  the  employment  of  adequate 
methods  for  exhibiting  and  advertising 
its  books  and  their  contents  and  charac- 
ter to  the  public.  Classification,  annota- 
tion, analysis,  in  catalogues  and  bulle- 
tins, with  indexes,  reference-lists,  helpful 
hand-books,  and  bibliographical  guides, 
—  these  are  objects  of  expenditure  more 
important  than  the  gathering  of  numer- 
ous books.  A  small,  well-chosen  library, 
in  systematic  order,  opening  every  ave- 
nue to  its  contents  that  can  be  cleared 
and  lighted  up  by  judicious  labor,  —  in- 
spiring, leading,  and  helping  its  studious 
readers   by  all  the  methods   which  the 


PUBLIC   EDUCATION       157 

earnest  library  workers  of  this  country 
are  learning  to  employ,  —  is  an  agent  of 
education  more  powerful  than  the  great- 
est collection  can  ever  become,  if  the 
ambition  in  the  latter  to  have  books  out- 
runs the  ambition  to  spread  the  influ- 
ence of  its  books.  Both  of  these  ambitions 
are  working,  more  or  less,  in  the  popular 
libraries  of  this  country  ;  but  the  spirit  of 
the  time  and  the  race  is  on  the  side  of 
the  wiser  purpose,  and  it  is  wonderful  to 
see  with  what  contagion  of  zeal  the  dif- 
fusive work  of  our  public  libraries  has 
been  animated  in  late  years.  It  is  be- 
cause I  honor  so  highly  the  conscience 
that  has  been  awakened  in  the  work  of 
these  libraries,  and  the  power  they  are 
acquiring  among  the  institutions  of  de- 
mocracy, that  I  wish  to  see  no  waste  in 
their  energies. 


VII 
SCHOOL-READING 

VERSUS 

SCHOOL-TEACHING   OF 
HISTORY 


SCHOOL-READING 

VERSUS 

SCHOOL-TEACHING   OF 
HISTORY- 

If  I  did  not  know  the  fact  to  be  other- 
wise, I  should  suppose  that  a  desire  for 
some  satisfying  knowledge  of  the  past 
life  of  mankind,  and  especially  within  the 
range  of  direct  ancestries  and  inherit- 
ances, would  be  one  of  the  keenest  crav- 
ings of  every  active  mind.  That  it  is 
not  so  is  too  obvious  to  need  proof ;  and 
I  think  that,  on  reflection,  we  can  under- 
stand the  fact.  That  which  lies  near  to 
us  and  in  sunlight  will  naturally,  always, 
engage  our  attention  more  easily  and 
hold  it  more  strongly  than   that  which 

1  Read  at  a  meeting  of  the  Buffalo  Historical 
Society,  to  which  teachers  of  history  were  invited. 
May,  1906. 


i62  SCHOOI^READING 

is  shadowed  and  remote.  The  bit  of  re- 
cently past  time  which  we  call  the  Present 
is  our  sunlighted  portion  of  time,  and 
its  subjects  and  objects  of  interest  are 
pressed  most  insistently  upon  us.  To 
a  great  extent  we  are  compelled  to  give 
them  the  first  place  in  our  thoughts ; 
because  our  means  of  subsistence,  and 
therefore  our  lives,  are  dependent  on 
things  and  conditions,  not  as  they  have 
been,  but  as  they  are.  Our  social  rela- 
tions, moreover,  our  ambitions,  our  activ- 
ities of  all  kinds,  are  under  the  same 
control.  Those  things  and  conditions,  to 
be  sure,  have  their  roots  in  the  past  and 
their  growth  out  of  it ;  but  the  fruits  that 
are  ripening  from  them  ftow  are  what  we 
have  to  gather,  for  the  daily  provisioning 
of  daily  life,  and  they  busy  us  so  that  we 
can  easily  lose  thought  of  the  historic 
soils  and  saps  from  which  they  came. 

It  is  thus,  by  a  thousand  imperative 
needs  and  interests,  that  the  Present,  or 
what  we  call  so,  wins  a  natural  domina- 


OF   HISTORY  163 

tion,  and  may  even  take  the  nearly  full 
possession,  of  our  minds.  I  can  under- 
stand, therefore,  how  and  why  the  ma- 
jority of  people  feel  no  apparent  want  of 
any  knowledge  beyond  that  which  the 
morning  newspaper  supplies,  of  men  and 
things  in  the  world  of  the  passing  day : 
the  practical  knowledge  that  suffices  for 
traffic,  speculation,  partisan  politics,  so- 
cial conversation,  and  other  immediate 
interests  in  life.  I  can  understand,  too, 
how  and  why  it  is  that  so  many,  among 
the  people  whose  appetite  of  the  brain 
calls  for  meats  which  the  reporters  of  the 
daily  press  cannot  serve  to  them,  prefer 
other  kinds  of  knowledge  before  that  of 
human  history,  caring  more  to  know  how 
the  earth  got  its  structure,  or  how  beasts, 
birds,  and  insects  acquired  their  varia- 
tions, or  how  plants  are  best  classified, 
or  how  the  forces  in  nature  are  related 
to  each  other,  than  to  know  something 
of  the  experience  that  the  generations 
of  mankind  have  gone  through,  in  their 


1 64  SCHOOL-READING 

long  procession  down  the  ages  of  the 
dead ;  something  of  the  influences  that 
have  played  upon  them,  —  the  changes 
in  outward  circumstance  and  inward 
state  that  they  have  undergone,  —  the 
successions  of  their  tasks,  their  achieve- 
ments, their  struggles,  —  out  of  which 
have  come  Humanity  as  we  know  it, 
Life  as  we  live  it,  Society  as  we  make 
part  of  it,  the  Earth  as  we,  the  latest  heirs 
to  that  human-family  estate,  find  it  fitted 
and  furnished  for  our  habitation.  I  can 
see  all  such  preference  of  Science  before 
History  to  be  natural,  because  it  is  con- 
sequent on  the  overpowering  pressure 
with  which  present  objects  and  present  in- 
terests are  forced  upon  the  attention  of  our 
minds.  Science  in  general  is  a  study  for 
the  most  part  of  things  as  the  student 
sees  them  with  his  own  eyes,  —  the  phe- 
nomena of  his  own  day,  —  and  it  tends, 
as  commerce  and  society  and  newspa- 
pers do,  to  cultivate  habits  of  mental 
seclusion  within  some  limited  region  of 


OF  HISTORY  165 

passing  time.  There  is  no  fault  to  be 
found  with  the  preference  of  that  study, 
choosing-  the  good  knowledge  of  Science 
before  the  good  knowledge  of  History ; 
nor  need  we  blame  the  more  prac- 
tical choice  which  rates  a  necessary 
knowledge  of  the  existing  conditions  of 
life  above  the  interesting  knowledge  of 
how  those  conditions  came  to  be  what 
they  are.  There  is  no  fault,  I  say,  to 
be  found  with  such  preferences,  except 
where  they  put  History  quite  out  of 
consideration,  as  they  often  seem  to  do. 
That  goes  beyond  my  understanding ; 
for  it  is  no  natural  consequence  of  any- 
thing that  the  obtrusive  and  exacting 
Present  imposes  upon  us. 

In  saying  that  the  prevalent  disposition 
to  put  History  behind  other  more  obtru- 
sive matters  of  knowledge  is  natural  and 
explainable,  I  do  not  mean  to  imply  that 
it  is  reasonable,  or  that  Science  is  of 
more  importance  than  History,  or  that 
the  Present  holds  more  of  the  valuables 


i66  SCHOOL-READING 

of  life  than  are  stored  for  us  in  the  re- 
membered Past.  There  are  no  such  com- 
parisons to  be  made.  Present  and  Past, 
from  the  same  spinning  of  time,  into  the 
same  never-broken  thread,  woven  into 
the  same  continuous  fabric  of  human  life, 
have  no  divisible  value  to  us.  Neither 
can  be  to  us  nor  signify  to  us  anything 
independently  of  the  other.  The  Past 
has  its  explanations  in  the  Present,  the 
Present  in  the  Past.  Whatever  real  sub- 
stance of  knowledge  we  get  into  our 
minds,  and  whatever  real  substance  of 
satisfaction  we  get  into  our  lives,  must 
come  from  both. 

Mr.  Rhodes,  the  historian,  in  an  excel- 
lent address  which  he  made  on  taking  the 
chair  of  the  presidency  of  the  American 
Historical  Association,  in  1899,  conceded 
too  much,  I  think,  on  this  point.  "  The 
Present,"  he  said,  "  is  more  important 
than  the  Past,  and  those  sciences  which 
contribute  to  our  comfort,  place  within 
reach  of  the  laborer  and  mechanic  as 


OF   HISTORY  167 

common  necessaries  what  would  have 
been  the  highest  luxury  to  the  Roman 
emperor  or  to  the  king  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  contribute  to  health  and  the  pre- 
servation of  life,  and,  by  the  develop- 
ment of  railroads,  make  possible  such 
a  gathering  as  this,  —  these  agencies,  we 
cheerfully  admit,  outrank  our  modest 
enterprise,  which,  in  the  words  of  Herod- 
otus, is  *  to  preserve  the  remembrance  of 
what  men  have  done.'  "  I  cannot  agree 
with  this  view.  I  would  say,  on  the  con- 
trary, that  History  has  an  underlying  and 
upholding  relation  to  every  science  and 
every  industry,  and  cannot,  therefore,  be 
outranked  by  any.  We  could  not  even 
choose  our  foods  for  to-day's  dinner  if 
we  had  nothing  from  the  Past  of  mankind 
to  instruct  us  concerning  the  gifts  of 
nature  that  are  eatable  and  those  that 
are  not.  That  is  History,  on  its  simplest 
side.  No  man  of  to-day  could  even  form 
the  conception  of  a  railroad  locomotive, 
and  far  less  construct  one,  if  History  had 


i68  SCHOOL-READING 

not  brought  to  him  the  ideas  of  Watt 
and  Stephenson  from  a  century  ago.  It 
is  so  with  everything  in  the  passing  day 
that  we  do  or  wish  to  do,  that  we  obtain 
or  wish  to  obtain,  that  we  know  or  wish 
to  know  :  there  is  something  of  History 
behind  it  all  which  we  must  understand 
if  the  doing  or  obtaining  or  knowing  is 
to  be  a  possible  thing. 

And  it  is  not  alone  in  those  outward 
ways  that  the  Past  comes  historically  into 
every  present  moment.  It  has  more 
entrance  than  we  are  apt  to  suspect  into 
all  the  chambers  and  all  the  processes 
of  our  minds.  We  do  no  thinking,  we 
exercise  no  imagination,  we  have  no 
emotion,  without  it.  For  what  is  memory 
but  the  private  historical  collection  which 
each  man  makes  for  himself  ?  It  may  be 
limited  very  closely  to  the  annals  of  his 
own  life,  —  to  the  little  region  of  his  own 
doings  and  experiences  ;  but  even  at  the 
narrowest,  there  will  always  be  some- 
thing  from   a   larger   history   that   has 


OF   HISTORY  169 

crept  into  it,  and  which  has  some  kind 
of  vague  participation  in  his  feelings  and 
thoughts.  Names,  at  least,  that  carry 
some  historical  meaning,  will  have  got 
a  lodgment  in  his  brain.  Washington, 
Shakspere,  Columbus,  Caesar,  Mara- 
thon, Magna  Charta,  the  Declaration  of 
Independence,  the  French  Revolution, 
and  other  men,  movements,  and  docu- 
ments of  the  Past,  will  figure,  in  some 
dim  way,  in  his  beliefs,  and  in  the  general 
notions  that  run  through  all  the  workings 
of  his  mind.  Try  to  conceive,  if  you  can, 
the  state  of  a  human  consciousness  in 
which  absolutely  nothing  of  such  histor- 
ical idea-stuff  is  contained ;  then,  perhaps, 
you  can  realize  how  much  the  more  or 
less  of  it  has  to  do  with  the  measure  and 
quality  of  our  lives.  The  historical 
memory,  in  fact,  is  like  an  atmosphere  in 
our  mental  world,  making  it  spatial,  put- 
ting distance,  perspective,  scenery  into 
it,  by  refractions  and  diffusions  of  our  con- 
sciousness, which  otherwise  would  be  like 


lyo  SCHOOL-READING 

the  flash  on  flash  of  straight  sun-rays  to 
an  eye  looking  out  from  the  airless  moon, 
which  could  never  see  aught  but  the  sun 
itself.  Without  its  importation  of  some- 
thing from  the  long  Past  into  the  sensa- 
tions of  the  momentary  present,  our  lives 
would  be  like  the  journey  of  a  traveler 
through  dark  tunnels  underground. 

To  think  of  this  is  to  recognize  the 
absolute  emptiness  of  those  current  in- 
stants of  time  which  we  call  the  Present, 
except  as  we  bring  furniture  to  them  by 
importation  from  the  Past,  in  private 
stores  that  are  Memory  or  in  public  stores 
that  are  History.  We  not  only  borrow 
from  the  days  that  are  gone  every  power 
that  enables  us  to  extort  the  practical 
necessities  of  life  from  this  present  day, 
but  we  go  to  them  for  everything  that 
lends  interest  to  the  passing  days  of  our 
lives.  This  is  the  great  fact  which  puts 
historical  knowledge,  in  my  esteem, 
above  all  other  matters  of  knowledge 
that    man    can    seek.     By    enrichment 


OF  HISTORY  171 

of  his  consciousness  it  enriches  every- 
thing that  is  interesting  in  his  life.  The 
realm  of  his  mind  is  narrow  or  large  in 
its  resources  of  interest,  according  to  the 
radius  of  its  historical  horizon  and  its 
scenic  vision  of  general  human  life.  His- 
torical knowledge  is  needed,  therefore, 
for  all  minds,  as  the  indispensable  furni- 
ture of  a  satisfying  mental  life.  The  man 
of  science  and  the  man  of  business  can 
give  room  to  it,  not  only  with  no  detriment 
to  the  specialized  occupations  of  their 
thought,  but  with  gains  of  animation  and 
enlargement  that  could  come,  I  am  sure, 
from  nothing  else.  It  is  the  one  kind  of 
knowledge  which,  more  than  any  other, 
is  expansive  in  its  whole  efifect ;  which 
resists  the  monotonizing  of  interests 
and  the  narrowing  of  views.  "  Histo- 
ries," says  Bacon,  in  his  pregnant  essay 
on  "Studies,"  —  "histories  make  men 
wise,"  and  he  gave  them  the  first  place 
in  all  that  he  commends. 

These,  to    me,  are    the    all-sufficient 


172  SCHOOL-READING 

reasons  for  an  early  and  long  and  large 
use  of  History  in  educational  work.  The 
more  specific  pleas  for  it,  urged  com- 
monly :  that  it  exercises  the  judgment 
and  the  imagination,  —  that  it  is  full  of 
ethical  lessons  and  instructive  examples 
of"  character,  —  that  it  will  cultivate  pa- 
triotism, and  the  like,  — are  not  so  strong. 
They  are  all  true ;  there  is  sound  argu- 
ment in  them  all  ;  but  they  are  all  tran- 
scended by  the  fact  that,  in  the  nature 
of  the  human  mind,  its  very  capacity  for 
any  knowledge,  and  its  pleasure  in  any, 
are  dependent  on  the  spatial  and  per- 
spective conditions  imparted  to  it  by  its 
own  historian,  the  Memory.  More  or  less 
of  History  it  must  carry  among  its  con- 
tents, in  order  to  be  at  all  an  intelligent 
mind.  For  its  richest  and  best  endow- 
ment of  power  to  do  and  to  enjoy,  in 
any  field  of  human  endeavor,  it  cannot 
be  freighted  with  too  much. 

What,   then,  can  be  more  important 
in  education  than  the  use  of  mcims  and 


OF   HISTORY  173 

efforts  to  overcome  those  strenuous  pres- 
sures and  influences  which  tend  naturally 
to  hold  the  attention  of  people  too  closely 
to  things  of  the  passing  day,  blinding 
them  to  the  wonderful  landscapes  of  the 
historic  Past,  and  depriving  them  of  its 
immeasurable  enrichment  of  the  life  of 
the  mind?  Until  recent  years  History 
had  no  well-recognized  place  in  common 
or  general  schemes  of  education.  Now 
it  is  winning  a  fairly  acknowledged  foot- 
ing in  our  elementary  and  secondary 
schools,  but  only  by  hard  contention  and 
competition  with  studies  that  offer,  as  it 
seems  to  me,  no  comparable  gifts  of  cul- 
ture or  power.  The*  claims  for  it  are  still 
too  low.  Its  place  should  not  be  in  the 
ruck  of  an  overcrowded  curriculum,  but 
clear  in  the  van  of  preferred  subjects, 
through  all  grades  from  the  middle,  at 
least,  of  every  elementary  course.  I  ven- 
ture to  predict  that  the  consideration  it 
is  beginning  to  receive  will  soon  give  it 
an  unquestioned  title  to  that  place.    Fur- 


174  SCHOOL-READING 

thermore,  I  shall  venture  to  submit 
some  speculations  of  thought  that  I  have 
indulged  myself  in,  concerning  a  school 
treatment  of  History  which  might  pos- 
sibly be  more  effectual  than  the  modes 
of  treatment  now  pursued.  I  am  not  a 
teacher ;  I  have  done  no  teaching  at  any 
time  of  my  life ;  and  I  should  be  guilty 
of  great  presumption  if  I  spoke  with  dog- 
matism on  the  subject ;  but  I  think  there 
can  be  no  impropriety  in  a  plain  state- 
ment of  my  thought  to  those  who  can 
give  it  consideration  from  the  teacher's 
point  of  view. 

I  assume  that  the  general  purpose  and 
aim  of  the  work  done  in  our  school-rooms 
is  not  to  stock  the  minds  of  the  young 
with  a  provision  of  knowledge,  in  any 
department,  that  will  suffice  them  for 
their  lives ;  but  rather  to  introduce  them 
to  knowledge,  —  prepare  them  to  be  re- 
ceptive of  it,  —  acquaint  them  with  its 
attractions  and  its  uses,  — put  them  in 
the  way  of  pursuing  the  acquisition  of  it 


OF   HISTORY  175 

through  later  life,  and  familiarize  them 
with  the  paths  of  that  pursuit.  This  must 
be  so  in  the  matter  of  History,  if  in 
nothing  else.  No  intelligent  teachers  of 
History  will  think  that  they  have  given 
as  much  of  it  to  their  classes  as  can  be 
for  the  pupils'  good.  On  the  other  hand, 
no  teachers  will  work  with  an  eye  to  the 
turning  out  of  whole  classes  of  profes- 
sional historians,  trained  for  exhaustive 
research,  and  destined  to  devote  their 
lives  to  the  study  and  original  construc- 
tion of  history  from  its  sources  in  public 
and  private  depositories  of  important 
fact.  For  one  in  a  thousand,  perhaps,  the 
instruction  fitted  to  that  end  might  be 
given  profitably  ;  but  it  would  not  be  of 
profit  to  the  remaining  nine  hundred  and 
ninety-nine.  The  service  of  the  school  to 
them  in  this  matter  must  simply  be  such 
as  to  make  them  lovers  of  the  literature 
of  History,  —  lovers,  that  is,  of  History 
as  a  finished  product  of  trained  research 
and  judgment  and  literary  art.  In  a  word, 


176  SCHOOL-READING 

I  would  say  that  the  office  of  the  school 
in  its  educational  use  of  History  is  to 
evoke  the  appetite  for  historical  reading, 
and  to  prepare  judgment  and  taste  for 
a  right  choice  of  writers  and  books. 

Is  this  office  performed  in  the  best 
possible  way  by  any  method  of  teaching 
History  now  employed  in  our  schools? 
I  have  been  led  to  serious  doubts  on  that 
point ;  and  my  doubts  have  gone  so  far 
as  to  question  whether  the  results  I  have 
indicated  can  be  attained  satisfactorily 
by  any  treatment  of  History  that  would 
be  describable  as  "  teaching,"  in  the  cus- 
tomary use  of  the  word.  I  have  read 
many  excellent  papers  on  such  methods, 
written  by  wise  and  earnest  teachers,  of 
great  experience ;  and  the  fine  thought 
and  spirit  in  most  of  them  have  impressed 
me  very  much  ;  but  at  the  base  of  them 
all,  I  find  more  or  less  of  a  catechising 
requirement  which  cannot,  as  I  would 
judge,  be  favorable  to  the  reading-inter- 
est and  habit  that  we  wish  to  create.    It 


OF   HISTORY  177 

involves  a  piece-meal  treatment  of  the 
details  in  an  historical  narrative,  which 
breaks  the  continuity  of  impression  from 
them  on  the  pupil's  mind.  But  most 
of  that  allured  and  prolonged  attention 
which  we  call  "  interest "  depends  on 
this  very  continuity  of  impressions  which 
such  treatment  breaks  up.  For  History 
is,  essentially,  a  story,  and  my  feeling  is 
that  it  must  not  be  spoiled  as  a  story  by 
anything  done  to  it  in  the  schools.  What- 
ever it  carries,  of  political,  moral,  and 
other  meanings  and  teachings,  is  carried 
in  the  current  of  its  story,  not,  I  am  sure, 
to  be  fished  out  with  question-hooks,  but 
to  be  borne  fluently  into  the  mind,  with 
the  stream,  which  will  create  for  it  a  wel- 
coming thirst. 

What  I  wish  to  argue  for,  therefore,  is 
the  simple  reading  of  History  in  schools, 
with  no  analytical  teaching,  questioning, 
or  periodical  examination,  to  break  the 
thread  of  the  tale  which  the  school  or 
the  class  pursues.   Of  course  it  should  be 


178  SCHOOL-READING 

systematic  reading,  under  the  lead  of  a 
capable  teacher,  whose  accompanying 
comments  may  emphasize,  explain,  illu- 
minate, and  illustrate,  here  and  there, 
according  to  need  ;  but,  as  nearly  as 
possible,  it  ought,  I  think,  to  preserve 
the  effect  which  a  mind  experiences  in 
taking  information  to  itself,  by  its  own 
volition  and  its  own  absorption,  from  a 
printed  page.  Leave  the  matter  of  the 
reading  to  have  what  fate  it  will  in  various 
minds  I  Trust  all  immediate  results  to 
the  ultimate  result !  What  if  the  daily 
leakage  from  young  minds  is  large, 
provided  we  are  opening  inlets  to  them 
from  springs  in  later  years  that  will  never 
run  dry  !  Let  us  remember  the  stream- 
likeness  of  this  story  of  the  Past,  and 
allow  it  to  trickle  its  course  through  such 
irrigating  brain-channels  as  it  finds,  with 
no  incessant  casting  of  lead-lines  to  test 
its  depth  !  It  is  not  in  this  matter  as  it  is 
with  the  little  cisterns  of  Arithmetic  and 
Grammar  and  Geography  that  we  try  to 


OF   HISTORY  179 

fill,  once  for  all,  in  the  brain.  There  the 
quizzing  plummet  and  the  examination 
dredge  have  their  proper  use.  Here  we 
are  introducing  something  very  different, 
for  a  very  different  action  and  agency  ; 
something  to  be  for  a  general  diffusion, 
expansion,  refreshment,  and  stimulation 
of  all  consciousness,  all  feeling,  all  im- 
agination, all  thought.  Then  why  not 
give  it  free  play,  meddling  as  little  as 
possible  with  its  natural  flow  and  with 
the  natural  deposits  it  will  leave  ? 

In  my  thought  of  this  treatment  of 
History,  in  elementary  and  secondary 
schools,  the  scheme  of  it  would  be  some- 
thing like  this : 

I.  An  underlying  use  of  such  readable 
text-books  of  abbreviated  History  as  can 
be  found  ;  such  text-books  as  are  not 
mere  packages  of  assorted  fact,  but  which 
give  a  fluent  showing  of  the  main  move- 
ments of  events,  with  a  moderate  amount 
of  detail.  These  to  be  carriers,  as  it  were, 
of  the  historical  narrative  through   its 


i8o  SCHOOL-READING 

less  important  parts,  where  they  suffice 
to  keep  interest  alive  or  to  make  the 
connection  with  coming  incidents  under- 
stood. 

2.  The  bringing  in  of  passages  and 
chapters  from  the  classic  and  standard 
works  of  historical  literature  at  all  points 
in  the  narrative  where  a  broader  and 
more  vivid  treatment  can  be  introduced 
with  marked  effect. 

3.  A  judicious  accompaniment  of  com- 
ment and  explanation  by  the  directing 
teacher,  restrained  carefully  to  avoid 
much  diversion  of  mind  from  the  reading 
itself. 

For  example,  if  I  planned  an  experiment 
in  this  treatment  of  History  with  a  class  of 
young  people,  I  would  take  such  a  book 
as  might  easily  be  made  out  of  Freeman's 
**  General  Sketch  of  European  History" 
and  use  it  for  the  threading  of  careful 
selections  from  the  best  historical  litera- 
ture within  its  field.  It  is  a  book  that 
needs  revision  of  its  first  two  chapters, 


OF   HISTORY  i8i 

to  bring  into  it  later  views  and  revelations 
in  ethnology  and  Greek  archaeology ; 
otherwise  it  seems  to  me  to  be  excellent 
in  its  adaptation  to  such  a  use.  It  could 
introduce  bits  of  reading,  in  the  first  in- 
stance, from  the  Iliad  and  from  some  of 
the  Greek  hero-myths,  in  connection  with 
extracts  from  popular  accounts  of  the 
explorations  at  Troy,  Mycenae,  and  in 
Crete,  M'hich  throw  light  on  their  sources 
in  historical  fact.  For  a  first  reading  in 
Greek  history.  Freeman's  sketch  gives 
enough  of  the  origin  and  general  course 
of  the  Persian  wars ;  but  the  stories  of 
Marathon,  Thermopylae,  and  Salamis 
should  be  read  in  Herodotus,  or  in 
Plutarch's  Miltiades  or  Themistocles, 
or  in  both.  Then  I  would  carry  the  read- 
ing to  those  short  sections  of  the  first 
book  of  Thucydides  (89  to  99)  in  which 
he  tells  in  his  plain  way  "  how  the  Athe- 
nians attained  the  positions  in  which  they 
rose  to  greatness"  after  the  destruction 
of  their  city  in  the  last  of  the  Persian 


i82  SCHOOL-READING 

wars  ;  how  they  formed  the  Confederacy 
of  Delos  and  took  the  leadership  of  it ; 
how  they  abused  their  domination,  made 
subjects  of  their  allies,  and  so  aroused 
the  hostilities  and  jealousies  that  brought 
ruin  upon  them  in  the  ensuing  Pelopon- 
nesian  War.  To  this  I  would  add  the 
later  part  of  Plutarch's  life  of  Aristides, 
which  tells  of  the  strengthening  of  de- 
mocracy at  Athens  at  the  end  of  the  Per- 
sian wars  and  gives  further  particulars 
of  the  formation  of  the  Delian  Confeder- 
acy ;  and  I  would  draw  yet  more  from 
Plutarch  by  liberal  extracts  from  his  lives 
of  Themistocles  and  Pericles.  To  deepen 
and  widen  the  impression  from  this,  the 
great  period  in  Greek  history,  I  know  of 
nothing  better  to  be  brought  to  a  young 
class  than  may  be  found  in  chapters  XVI 
and  XVII  of  Evelyn  Abbott's  book  on 
"  Pericles  and  the  Golden  Age  of  Athens." 
I  am  not  sure  that  Freeman's  slight 
sketch  of  the  Peloponnesian  War  would 
need  any  enlargement ;  but   something 


OF   HISTORY  183 

from  Thucydides  and  Xenophon,  and 
from  Plutarch's  Alcibiades  and  Lysander, 
might  supplement  it  interestingly  and 
with  profit.  As  for  the  period  between 
the  Peloponnesian  War  and  the  intrusion 
of  Philip  of  Macedon  into  Greek  affairs, 
there  seems  to  be  little  call  for  going 
beyond  Freeman's  brief  account. 

On  coming  to  the  Macedonian  epoch 
it  would  undoubtedly  be  desirable  to  in- 
terest our  young  readers  somewhat  more, 
not  only  in  the  extraordinary  conquests  of 
Alexander,  but  in  the  preparatory  work 
of  Philip,  his  father,  who  was  the  abler 
and  greater  man  of  the  two.  My  sug- 
gestion would  be  to  take  something  in 
the  first  instance,  for  that  purpose,  from 
Plutarch's  Demosthenes,  and  a  few  pages 
from  the  66th  and  67th  of  Niebuhr's 
*•  Lectures  on  Ancient  History,"  where 
both  Philip  and  his  great  Athenian  op- 
ponent are  estimated  with  much  fairness 
of  view.  Concerning  the  immeasurable 
importance  of  Alexander's  heroic  career. 


184  SCHOOI^READING 

in  its  effects  upon  subsequent  histor}'-, 
there  is  no  room  for  two  opinions ;  but 
historians  have  differed  so  widely  in  their 
estimates  of  the  hero  that  young  readers 
should  be  acquainted,  I  think,  with  the 
opposing  views.  Thirlwall  admires  him 
and  credits  him  largely  with  the  great 
results  that  came  from  what  he  did. 
Grote  does  not.  Perhaps  there  could  be 
selections  from  each.  After  the  death  of 
Alexander,  I  judge  that  Freeman  has  told 
all  that  can  be  made  interesting  or  in- 
structive to  the  average  school-boy  or 
school-girl,  down  to  the  time  when  Greek 
history  is  merged  in  that  of  Rome. 

Turning,  then,  to  the  latter,  I  would 
plan  a  similar  course,  in  which  Freeman 
should  furnish  the  links  of  connection 
between  readings  from  Livy,  Plutarch, 
Polybius,  Cgesar,  Tacitus,  Mommsen, 
Merivale,  Gibbon,  and  many  more. 

If  half  an  hour  daily  could  be  given 
to  such  readings,  during  seven  or  eight 
years   of   the  period  spent  by   a   pupil 


OF   HISTORY  185 

in  graded  school  and  high  school,  they 
would  not  only  carry  him,  I  judge,  over 
very  wide  ranges  of  general  history,  and 
into  familiarizing  and  appetizing  touch 
with  its  best  literature,  but  ample  time 
would  remain,  I  am  sure,  for  repetitions 
and  enlargements  of  the  more  important 
parts  of  the  tour.  Possibly  in  such  repe- 
titions, traversing  English  and  American 
history  for  the  second  time,  more  leisurely 
and  with  more  nearly  ripened  minds, 
there  might  be  something  of  the  step-by- 
step  "  teaching  "  introduced  with  advan- 
tage. It  might  then  be  possible  to  scru- 
tinize, analyze,  correlate,  and  otherwise 
discuss  events  and  incidents  one  by  one, 
without  destroying  interest  in  the  his- 
torical movement  to  which  they  belong ; 
but  I  cannot  believe  that  a  first  reading 
of  history  should  be  broken  in  any  such 
way.  I  cannot  believe  that  a  tape-meas- 
urement of  "  lessons  "  in  it,  with  a  halt 
for  quizzing  at  each  mark  on  the  tape,  is 
as  educational  in  this  matter  as  a  free 


i86  SCHOOL-READING 

excursion  would  be.  I  cannot  believe  that 
History  will  waken  the  feeling  that  it 
ought  to  excite  in  the  mind  of  a  young 
student,  if  it  is  thrust  upon  him  in  a  dry 
compend,  which  he  must  glue  his  un- 
willing eyes  to,  while  remembering  al- 
ways that  the  trigger  of  an  examination 
trap  may  be  lurking  in  every  name,  date, 
and  circumstance  that  it  holds.  For  His- 
tory, if  for  nothing  else  that  the  school 
gives  him,  I  would  ease  him  of  that 
dread,  and  make  him  free  to  experience 
pleasure  and  desire.  I  would  make  him 
his  own  examiner,  by  requiring  him,  at 
intervals,  to  write  a  summary  in  his  own 
language  of  what  he  has  gathered  from 
the  last  week  or  fortnight  of  the  readings. 
There  is  no  other  process  of  durable 
memorizing  that  equals  that ;  and  I  be- 
lieve it  could  be  trusted,  in  connection 
with  such  readings  as  I  suggest,  to  yield 
better  results  than  are  coming  from  the 
catechized  "  study  "  of  History  now  pur- 
sued in  our  schools. 


OF   HISTORY  187 

I  know  the  hazard  of  my  venture  in 
theorizing  without  practical  experience, 
and  I  am  prepared  to  have  it  shown  to 
me  that  my  suggestions  are  impracti- 
cable, or  that,  if  practicable,  they  would 
not  answer  my  expectations  in  the  result. 
If  experience  so  adjudges  them,  I  only 
ask  to  be  told  why. 


(Cbe  Ritaerjibe  presiS 

EUctrotyped  and  printed  hy  H  .  O.  Houghton  b'  Co. 
Cambridge,  Mass.,  U.  S.  A. 


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